After graduating from high school in 1977, Vogl studied German literature, philosophy and history in Munich and Paris. He completed his M.A. from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1984, and he earned his doctorate in German literature in 1990. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the German Research Foundation from 1992 to 1994 and a postdoctoral scholarship from 1995 to 1997. In 1999 Vogl became Professor of History and Theory of Artificial Worlds at the Faculty of Media of the Bauhaus University, Weimar In 2001 he qualified as a professor in the subject German Literature at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since April 1, 2006, he has held the Chair of Modern German Literature: Literary, Media and Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has also been Visiting Professor at Princeton University, at the University of California, Berkeley, and since 2007 he has been Permanent Visiting Professor at the Department of German at Princeton University. One research focus of Joseph Vogl is on the "Poetologies of knowledge" - the interweaving of knowledge and literature. Other priorities include the history and theory of knowledge, the history of risk and danger in the modern era, and the discourse, media theory and literary history from 18th to 20th century. Vogl's work is in the tradition of the post-structuralist philosophy. He is the translator of key works of modern French philosophy such as Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Jean-François Lyotard's The Conflict. In his 2010 published work Das Gespenst des Kapitals Vogl coined the term "Oikodizee", calling for a demystification of traditional conception of financial markets. The powerful faith in the invisible hand of the market in the tradition of Adam Smith "ignores the secularised theodicy the irrational" and the "diabolical dynamics unleashed by money economy. For his book Der Souveränitätseffekt Vogl was on the shortlist for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2015 in the category of non-fiction.
