University of Birmingham appoints new Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education

The University of Birmingham is delighted to announce that Professor Deborah Longworth has been appointed as its new Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education.

Professor Longworth is currently acting as Interim Pro-Vice-Chancellor Education, following the departure of Professor Kathy Armour at the end of last year. She was previously Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Student Academic Experience), and before that served for four years as Head of the Department of English Literature.

Announcing the appointment, University of Birmingham Vice-Chancellor Professor Adam Tickell commented: “Under Deborah’s leadership, we are well placed to continue to develop our education provision and ensure our offer to students is truly outstanding. She is committed to continuing our efforts for the University of Birmingham to be recognised as an innovative, exciting and rigorous place to learn.”

Accepting the post, Professor Longworth said: “I am delighted to be taking up the PVC Education role at this pivotal moment in the University’s strategic planning, as we develop a dynamic curriculum portfolio that will prepare our students to meet the opportunities and needs of the future, and support them in developing successful professional lives. I look forward to working with all of our staff and our students to shape, together, a truly inspirational and transformative education, and an academic community in which all are included and supported to thrive.”

Professor Longworth joined the University of Birmingham in 1998, having received her PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. She teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century literature at undergraduate and postgraduate level, with a particular focus on literary modernism, and on women’s writing and popular fiction. She is a founding member of the British Association of Modernist Studies, co-founder of the journal Modernist Cultures, and has published widely on modernism and on early twentieth-century women’s writing.