Shearer West

Professor Shearer West is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Nottingham. She has held a number of significant leadership roles in universities and higher education, including Head of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Birmingham, Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford University and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield. She also spent four years as Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council where she chaired the Research Directors Group for Research Councils UK.

She is a Professor of Art History and has authored and edited many articles and nine books including ‘Portraiture’; ‘The visual arts in Germany 1897-1940’; and ‘Fin de Siècle: Art and society in an age of uncertainty’. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and has held two visiting Fellowships at Yale University. She was formerly a member of the Board of Visitors for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and currently is a member of the Board of Universities UK.

She has held a number of international roles, including acting as main panel chair for the national research assessment exercise for Humanities in Norway and serving on the steering group to introduce impact into the Excellence in Research (ERA) exercise in Australia. She represented the UK on the Science Europe Humanities Scientific Committee, and has been a jurist for the Spinoza Prize in the Netherlands and the Odysseus and Solvay prizes in Belgium, as well as an Advisory Board member for the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Vienna.