Contact
Email the Vice-Chancellor and President’s Office: VCPDiary@adm.leeds.ac.uk
About
Professor Shearer West joined the University of Leeds on 1 November 2024 as its fourteenth Vice-Chancellor and President.
An expert in Art History, Professor West has held influential leadership roles in universities and higher education.
She obtained her BA degree in Art History and English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia in the United States of America, and her PhD in Art History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Professor West was awarded a CBE in the 2021 Queen’s New Year’s Honours List for services to higher education.
Career
After completing her PhD, Professor West worked as an editor for the Grove Dictionary of Art before taking up her first academic post at the University of Leicester.
In 1996, she moved to the University of Birmingham as Head of the History of Art Department, then Head of the School of Historical Studies, and Acting Head of the College of Arts and Law. She was awarded a personal chair in 2000.
In 2008 Professor West was appointed as Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council where she also chaired the Research Directors Group for Research Councils UK.
She then took up role as Head of the Humanities Division at Oxford in 2011, where she oversaw the launch of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities.
She was appointed as Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield in 2015. Professor West then joined the University of Nottingham as its first woman Vice-Chancellor in October 2017, leading its campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia and publishing its University Strategy in December 2019.
Board memberships and other roles
Professor West is a member of the Universities UK Board to help deliver its mission to maximise the higher education sector’s positive impact for staff, students and the public, through the highest quality teaching, research and scholarship.
She is also a board member and deputy chair of the Russell Group, which provides strategic advice, policy development and representation for the UK’s 24 leading research-intensive universities.
She is a Trustee and Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery and a former Visitor (trustee) of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Professor West has served in numerous international roles, including acting as the 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 is former Chair of the Universitas 21 global network of universities and is currently a board member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities and a member of the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong.
She has also represented the UK on the Science Europe Humanities Scientific Committee and has been a jurist for the Spinoza and Gravitation Prizes in the Netherlands and the Odysseus and Solvay Prizes in Belgium.
Publications
Professor West has authored and edited many articles and nine books including Portraiture, The visual arts in Germany 1897-1940: Utopia and Despair, and Fin De Siecle: 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.