Shearer West

Shearer Carroll West is a British-American art-historian and university administrator serving as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds since 2024. She was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham from 2017 to 2024.

Early life and education West was raised in a small town in southwest Virginia. Her father worked as a factory floor supervisor, and her mother was a high school teacher. West was the first in her family to attend university. During this period, she conducted research that would eventually be published in works such as Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty, a book that examined the cultural anxieties and artistic innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

During her tenure at the University of Nottingham, she oversaw several capital and infrastructure projects that faced criticism for cost overruns. These included an £80 million investment in a new campus that was subsequently sold for £14 million before becoming operational, as well as an IT transformation project that cost £80 million against an initial £50 million budget. A subsequent review of the IT project concluded that the implementation was overly complex. To fund these initiatives, the university implemented a redundancy program that affected approximately 30 percent of its staff. In May 2026, the university announced further cost-cutting measures, placing thousands of staff members at risk of redundancy in an effort to close a projected budget deficit.

In November 2024, West assumed the position of Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leeds, succeeding Simone Buitendijk and acting Vice-Chancellor Hai-Sui Yu.

Selected publications The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble, Palgrave MacMillan, 1991. Fin De Siecle: Art and society in an age of uncertainty, The Overlook Press, 1994. The visual arts in Germany 1897-1940: Utopia and Despair, Rutgers University Press, 2001. Portraiture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. (Oxford History of Art)