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Valérie Gonzalez is Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. She is a specialist of Islamic art history, aesthetics and visual culture. She obtained a PhD in Islamic Studies, University of Provence Aix-Marseille, and a Master of Fine Arts, School of Fine Arts, Marseille-Luminy. Her research addresses fundamental conceptual issues and creative processes in the Islamic artistic practices past and present such as figurality, abstraction, pictorial metaphysics or the philosophy of ornament. Her work relies on an interdisciplinary methodology ranging from art criticism and theory, aesthetic phenomenology and philosophy to linguistics, as well as the comparison with other global arts. She also writes critical texts for contemporary artists of Muslim heritage and/or interested in Islamic aesthetics. She was awarded scholarships from institutions such as the Kunsthistorisches Institut-Max-Planck-Institut, Florence, The Getty Research Institute, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture in MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Her books include: Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting, 1526-1658, Ashgate 2015; Le piège de Salomon, La pensée de l'art dans le Coran, Albin Michel, 2002, and Beauty and Islam, Aesthetics of Islamic Art and Architecture IBTauris, 2001. In 2004, her article “The Comares Hall in the Alhambra and James Turrell’s Space that Sees: A Comparison of Aesthetic Phenomenology, (Muqarnas, 20) won the Eisenstein Prize.