Professor Damian Walford Davies is Deputy Vice-Chancellor.

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor works closely with the Vice-Chancellor and the College and thematic Pro Vice-Chancellors to provide leadership to the University and deliver the goals of our strategy. Professor Walford Davies deputises for the Vice-Chancellor when required and is a member of the University Executive Board.

As Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Professor Walford Davies is responsible for:

• All equality, diversity and inclusion strategies and health, wellbeing and safety matters relating to both staff and students;
• Processes and policies relating to strategic planning;
• Implementation of the University estates strategies and projects;
• Policies and procedures relating to the sustainable development of the University, including environmental, social, academic, and financial sustainability;
• Liaison with the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW);
• Liaison with the Welsh Government;
• Processes and policies relating to corporate governance;
• Leadership of particular projects of strategic importance to the University.

Professor Walford Davies has also 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.

He also has oversight of the University’s Welsh language culture and strategy. He said:

“We have created a strategy that is a vision of a Welsh-language culture-on-campus across all our activities – one whose relevance is reckoned by reference to the values of connectivity, diversity, sustainability, wellbeing, cultural understanding and our duty to future generations.”

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 seven 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:

• Academic Promotions Committee
• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee
• Estates and Infrastructure Portfolio Steering Group
• Cardiff Innovation Campus Portfolio Steering Group
• Joint Consultative and Negotiation Forum (with campus unions)
• Welsh Language Executive Group
• Health, Safety and Wellbeing Committee
• Redundancy Committee
• Workload Modelling Governance Group
• Environmental Sustainability 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 historicism and the methodologies of Romantic Studies
• Romanticism and geography/cartography
• Welsh Writing in English
• Twentieth-century poetry
• Creative Writing, in particular poetry and ekphrasis/word-and-image, together with the interfaces between these periods and disciplines.

His recent work includes the co-edited collection Romantic Cartographies (Cambridge UP, 2020); the edited collection Counterfactual Romanticism (Manchester UP, 2019); and articles on Coleridge, shipwreck and trauma and on 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 Witch (2012), Judas (2015) and Docklands (2019), all published by Seren. He is also completing a creative non-fiction book, The Ground, which creatively burrows into five adjacent fields in the Vale of Glamorgan, and a ‘biography-in-verse’ of the great Italian cyclist, Gino Bartali (1914–2000), twice winner of the Tour de France (1938 and 1948).

Contact details

• Email: deputyvc@cardiff.ac.uk

Personal Assistant

Jane Blake-Wright

• Email: dvc-pa@cardiff.ac.uk