Shearer West

Professor Shearer West CBE is the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Leeds in the UK.

Previously, she spent seven years serving as the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Nottingham, including overseeing operations for the University’s campuses in China and Malaysia.

Shearer is a Professor of Art History and has held a number of significant leadership roles in universities and higher education. She obtained her B.A. degree in Art History and English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and her Ph.D. in Art History at St. Andrews. She worked as an editor for the Grove Dictionary of Art before taking up her first academic post in art history at the University of Leicester.

In 1996, Shearer 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, Shearer was appointed Director of Research at the Arts and Humanities Research Council where she also chaired the Research Directors Group for Research Councils UK. She was appointed 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 Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sheffield in 2015.

Shearer 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.

Shearer also has a number of 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 has also represented the UK on the Science Europe Humanities Scientific Committee, and has been a jurist for the Spinoza Prize and Gravitation Awards 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. Currently a member of the Board of Universities UK and the Board of the Russell Group, Shearer is also a Trustee and Deputy Chair of the National Portrait Gallery in London and a Board member of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society. She received a CBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours List of 2021.