The four-year junior research fellowship, starting in October 2015, has been set up to enable a promising early career scholar to undertake work on the topic of art as a source of knowledge.

Simoniti’s project ‘Artist as a Thinker: From Conceptual Art to Artistic Research’ will investigate the idea that art, like science, can amount to a kind of research. In the time when artists make work as residents in universities, museums and even scientific laboratories, has art become just another academic discipline? Drawing on case studies from Eastern and Western Europe, Simoniti’s work will uncover the historical and philosophical background to this question.

The project proposal grew out of several exhibitions that Simoniti has curated while working alongside artistic researchers on the Ruskin doctoral programme. It will also build on his recently completed doctoral thesis, ‘The Epistemic Value in Contemporary Art’, in which he investigates the relationship between artistic and philosophical modes of thinking.