Professor Shearer West, CBE 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: Utopia and Despair; 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 awarded a CBE in the 2021 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list.
Shearer also 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 and Gravitationprizes 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. She has recently joined the University Grants Committee in Hong Kong.
She is currently a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, a Board member of the Russell Group and Universities UK, and a Governor of King Edward’s Foundation Independent Schools Governing Body in Birmingham.
