Since October 2024, Joulia Smortchkova has held a Junior Professorship (CPJ) in Philosophy of Perception at Grenoble Alpes University. Prior to this position, she taught high school philosophy and was a postdoctoral researcher in Bochum and Oxford. She defended her doctoral thesis in 2014 at the Institut Jean Nicod under the supervision of Pierre Jacob. The subject of her thesis was the social content of our visual experiences.
Her current research focuses on first impressions. This project builds on her long-standing interest in the intersection between social cognition and perception, and is also linked to other themes she is exploring : natural categories in cognitive science, mental representations, the role of ordinary psychology in philosophy of mind and the interplay between perception, cognition and metacognition in the transformation of our concepts. His exploration extends to the philosophy of art, in order to understand our first impressions of artworks.
As part of the ERC project, she will study the role that mental files (and in particular perceptual files) can play in the formation of first impressions of people, objects and places.
