Valérie Kobi received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Neuchâtel in 2014 (Prix Nexans de la Recherche). She has been awarded grants and fellowships from prestigious institutions, including the German Academic Exchange Service, the Getty Research Institute, the Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, the Swiss Institute of Rome, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Between 2016 and 2021, she was furthermore a Fellow of the Young ZiF, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, in Bielefeld. In 2023, she was awarded the Hamburger Lehrpreis by the Hamburg Ministry for Science, Education, Research and Equality (BWFG).

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Her first book project, published under the title Dans l’œil du connoisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l’art (Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), aimed – through the example of the French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette – to define the different stages that marked the formation of knowledge in eighteenth-century art history and, more broadly, to question the role played by the figure of the connoisseur in this dynamic. Her most recent edited books include: Valérie Kobi, Chonja Lee, Kristel Smentek, Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2023), Terms of Style in Art History (Rome, Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2021), Johannes Grave, Christiane Holm, Valérie Kobi, Caroline van Eck (dir.), The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings, and Parerga (Dresden, Sandstein Verlag, 2018) and Valérie Kobi, Alexander Linke, Stephanie Marchal (dir.), Spannungsfeld Museum. Akteure, Narrative und Politik in Deutschland und Frankreich um 1900 (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2019).