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Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Photograph of Professor Walford Davies
Professor Damian Walford Davies, Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Professor Damian Walford Davies is Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

The Provost is the University’s Chief Academic Officer. Professor Walford Davies reports to the President and Vice-Chancellor and works closely with her to provide strategic academic leadership across the University’s three Colleges and deliver on the University’s Strategy. The role has delegated responsibility for the line management of the Pro Vice-Chancellors and Heads of College. He works closely with the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Transformation Officer, the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Student Experience and the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Enterprise. Professor Walford Davies deputises for the Vice-Chancellor when required and is a member of the University Executive Board.

The Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor’s portfolio includes responsibility and accountability for:

  • academic leadership across the Colleges of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering and Biomedical and Life Sciences
  • leading on academic resourcing and on the annual planning and budgeting process and academic planning-related enterprises, including projects related to strategic investments and efficiencies
  • delivering short- and long-term planning of student recruitment and delivery of targets, as well as the size and composition of future student intakes
  • strategic leadership of the University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Hub and of equality, diversity and inclusion strategies relating to both staff and students
  • health, wellbeing and safety matters relating to both staff and students, alongside the Director of People and Culture
  • strategic oversight of the University’s Welsh language strategy and culture
  • working with the Director of People and Culture to ensure constructive relationships with the campus Trade Unions
  • processes and policies relating to corporate governance;
  • liaison with Medr/The Commission for Tertiary Education and Research – Wales’s education regulator
  • liaison with the Welsh Government
  • leadership of projects of strategic importance to the University

Professor Walford Davies recently led two of the University’s major capital projects; the Centre for Student Life and sbarc ǀ spark, the world’s first social science park.

Professor Walford Davies served as Pro Vice-Chancellor for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (2018-2021) and as Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy (2014-2018). He also served as the first Chair of Literature Wales – one of Wales’s national arts companies (2012-2018) – and as Chair of the Board of Cardiff University Press (2015-18). He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

University Committees and groups

Professor Walford Davies chairs a number of committees and groups, including:

  • The annual Integrated Planning Process
  • Academic Promotions Committee
  • Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism Committee
  • Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee
  • Welsh Language Executive Group
  • Joint Consultative and Negotiation Forum (with campus unions)
  • Redundancy Committee

Publications and research

Professor Walford Davies’s main field of research is Romanticism, in particular the relation between literature and politics in the age of revolution. His publications have developed a creative-critical approach to the subject. His research interests also include:

  • the wider material cultures of the Romantic period
  • Romantic historicisms and the methodologies of Romantic Studies
  • Romanticism and geography/cartography
  • Welsh Writing in English
  • Twentieth-century poetry
  • Creative Writing

His recent publications include the co-edited collection Romantic Cartographies: Mapping, Literature, Culture, 1789-1832 (Cambridge UP, 2020); the edited collection Counterfactual Romanticism (Manchester UP, 2019); and articles on Coleridge, shipwreck and trauma and on John Keats’s creative-critical negotiations with the disease that killed him. He is completing the co-authored final volume of the Oxford Literary History of Wales, of which he is General Editor, and the Cambridge edition of Thomas Love Peacock's novel, The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829). His poetry collections include Viva Bartali! (2023), Docklands (2019), Judas (2015), Witch (2012) and Suit of Lights (2009), all published by Seren. He is currently completing projects on John Keats, Dylan Thomas and Thomas de Quincey, together with a creative non-fiction book, The Ground, which excavates five adjacent fields near his home.

Contact details

Personal Assistant

Emma Fisher