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Simon Ofield-Kerr

Prior to being appointed Vice-Chancellor of UCA, Dr Simon Ofield-Kerr was Executive Dean of Art, Design & Architecture at Kingston University where he lead the expansion of the postgraduate portfolio, the internationalisation of the culture, the embedding of research, the transition of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy from Middlesex to Kingston and the development of the Knights Park Campus. He was Dean for five years and for 2011/12 Art & Design at Kingston was placed in the top ten of the Guardian Subject League Tables.
Before joining Kingston he was Academic Group Chair for Art, Philosophy & Visual Culture at Middlesex University. Simon has a BA in Fine Art (Exeter College of Art & Design, 1990), an MA in The Social History of Art (University of Leeds, 1992), and was awarded his PhD from Leeds University in 1997. He was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Simon's research interests are focused on the relationships between social / sexual practices, pleasures and identities and both visual and literary cultures, and he has recently completed a series of articles circulating the work of Cecil Beaton, David Hockney, Francis Bacon and Keith Vaughan and the sexual economies in and around 1950s London. The last in the series was a catalogue essay for the Francis Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain in 2009. He is currently returning to researching nineteenth century visual and literary cultures and his long-standing fascination with the work of Henry Scott Tuke.

Simon is also committed to the international development of art and design education and has recent experience of working with universities in Southern Africa on course and portfolio development.

Experience

  • –present
    Vice Chancellor, University for the Creative Arts