Professor Simon Tanner is the Associate Vice President (Indonesia and South East Asia). He leads King’s engagement in Indonesia and is identifying opportunities to strengthen collaboration across Southeast Asia. He holds the title of Rector in Indonesia and South East Asia (reflecting regional conventions) due to our King's Singhasari Foundation campus and teaching in Indonesia. King’s Singhasari offers Masters degrees in Digital Economies and Digital Innovation and Leadership, and will add Cyber Security and Digital Law. King's is the first Russell Group university to provide place-based transnational education in Indonesia.

Simon is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. He has been a change-maker and innovator at every stage of his career. Simon’s skillset is forged in the fundamentals of digital management and strategic thinking, as demonstrated in his germinal Balanced Value Impact Model (www.bvimodel.org). He has also delivered 500+ digital and strategy projects over his career for leading cultural and memory institutions worldwide, including digitising the Dead Sea Scrolls. His OpenGLAM research has helped open over 49 million digital images for public access and re-use.

He has a wide-ranging interest in cross-disciplinary thinking and collaborative approaches with a strong emphasis on evidence-based decision-making. Simon recently led an evolution in teaching, research, and impact as Head of Humanities (2020-24). He was then the Executive Dean for Arts and Humanities (interim) for King's College London during 2024-25, leading over 600 colleagues, a £120+ million budget portfolio, and 6,000+ students.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Simon is a Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the Department of Digital Humanities with a particular research focus upon:

• Digital
• Impact: Balanced Value Impact Model
• Value: cultural, social and economic
• Museums, libraries and archives
• Memory and attention economics

His areas of research with the strongest international impact are, first, the economic realities and Open Access/Content strategies for digital content in cultural heritage and second, the Balanced Value Impact Model. He has also carried out extensive research in digitisation working with many national libraries, museums and government agencies or projects such as the Dead Sea Scrolls imaging.

Simon is Research Strand Co-lead (Understanding) — Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War. He is also currently applying the BVI Model to AgeUK Lambeth.

Simon is interested in PhD supervision which engages with these research themes and have supervised research engaged with digitisation in Africa, democratization, Open Access/Content, digital divides and impact plus memory, museums and digital imaging.

For more details, please see Simon's research profile.

Teaching

Simon teaches mainly in relation to the Leadership programme at King's Singhasari and some teaching in the MA Digital Asset and Media Management, MSc Digital Economy (SEA) and MA Digital Innovation and Leadership (SEA).

Expertise and public engagement

Simon has written for the Guardian on academic matters, as well as appearing on TV, radio and other media.

Simon is available to discuss issues of digitisation, value and economics in the digital domain, Open Access/Content, the digital divide and digital cultures.

From 2003 – 2011 Simon was an Independent Member of the Government appointed Legal Deposit Advisory Panel and Chair of its Web Archiving sub-committee that led to the enabling regulations for UK web archiving.

In 2025, Simon was the Executive Dean (Interim) for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King's.