Dr Vid Simoniti

Personal Statement

My academic work is in aesthetics, especially on the political dimension of contemporary art. In recent publications I have considered socially engaged art, the anti-racist art of the conceptual artist Adrian Piper, and artists' uses of future technologies. At Liverpool, I am Director of MA Art, Aesthetics and Cultural Institutions, a programme that combines philosophically-informed criticism with contemporary curating and art practice.

Recently, I have been hosting the Art Against the World pocast, a collaboration with the Liverpool Biennial. Across six episodes, I talk to artists about how their work can create social change.

In 2021, I have been selected as a BBC New Generation Thinker. As part of the scheme, I'll be appearing in various BBC radio programmes, commenting on art and philosophy.

My approach to philosophy is rooted in encounters with art history and current art practice. Together with the art historian James Fox I am currently running the research project “Art and Knowledge in the 20th Century” (2017-2021), sponsored by the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park foundation in Canada. I also occasionally collaborate on art projects as curator, and write for various art publications. For more information on these projects, have a look at my personal website or my Twitter.

Before joining the department at Liverpool in 2018, I was the Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge, where I taught in both History of Art and Philosophy departments. I obtained my doctorate (D.Phil.) from the University of Oxford in 2015.

I currently supervise two PhD projects (Lauren Stephens on museum ethics and existentialism; Harry Drummond on social cognition and aesthetics). I am happy to supervise PhD projects in aesthetics (analytic and continental), as well as projects at the intersection of curating and philosophy.