Professor Kerstin Mey, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Dean at the University of Westminster, has been appointed to the new role of Vice President for Academic Affairs and Student Engagement at University of Limerick.
In this new Vice President position, Professor Mey, who is from Germany, will direct a number of key UL services, including the library, Centre for Teaching and Learning, Quality Support Unit, Academic Strategic Planning, Graduate and Professional Studies, Cooperative Education and Careers Division and will oversee the academic faculties and graduate studies through the Deans.
According to UL President Dr Des Fitzgerald: “Over the past 25 years Kerstin Mey has built a track record of successfully initiating and implementing pioneering academic and research initiatives and cultural projects in higher education. As an experienced leader and senior manager, she led major infrastructure and culture change programmes and set up a range of strategic external partnerships. We are very much looking forward to welcoming Professor Mey to UL and to Limerick”.
On her appointment, Professor Mey stated: “Having been attracted by UL's values and its innovations in co-operative and entrepreneurship education, advanced research, academic programmes and rich offerings in culture and sport, I feel very privileged to join its community. I am very excited to work with UL staff, students, alumni, employers, partners and the wider community of Limerick and the region to shape the next generations of inquisitive and imaginative, engaged and resilient professionals, who make a difference in the world. I look forward to moving to Ireland and to continuing to promote a Europe that embraces openness and mobility, inclusion and equality.”
Professor Mey is due to take up the UL post in April 2018.
About Professor Kerstin Mey:
After studying for an MA equivalent in Art and German language and literature at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and obtaining a PhD in Art Theory and Aesthetics there, Kerstin Mey held academic positions in universities in Germany and the UK. Before she joined the University of Westminster as Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean of Media, Arts and Design, and Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in 2013, she was Director for Research and Enterprise at the University for the Creative Arts, UK. From 2009–2013 she led the research strand Art and its Locations in Interface: Centre for Research in Art, Technologies and Design at the University of Ulster and was Director of the Research Institute of Art and Design there.
At present, Kerstin Mey is Vice Chair of CHEAD (Council for Higher Education in Art and Design), UK, a member of the Austrian Science Board and member of the Supervisory Board of the EU funded European Centre for Press and Media Freedom. Previously, she was Director of CREST, Consortium for Research Excellence, Support and Training, in GuildHE, the interest group of small and specialist HEIs in the UK. She also served as member of the UK HE International Unit’s Community of Practice for European Research and Higher Education and was a member of the Information Commissioner’s Office Higher Education Sector Panel.
Her own research is concerned with contemporary art practices in relation to identity formation, digital literacies, cross-disciplinary connectivities, documentation and archives. She gives consideration to participatory and socially engaged creative practices and public pedagogies more generally. Publications include the authored book Art and Obscenity (2007); and, amongst others, the edited volumes: with Smite and Smites, Artistic Research (2011); with Kroenke and Spielmann, Kulturelle Umbrüche: Identitäten, Räume, Repräsentationen (2007); On-Site/In-Sight, special issue Journal of Visual Art Practice, Vols. 4.1/4.2 (2005); Art in the Making. Aesthetics, Historicity and Practice (2004) and Sculpsit (2001).
She was Artistic Director of ISEA 2009, the International Symposium of Electronic Arts, which was held on the island of Ireland under the umbrella theme Engaged Creativity in Mobile Environments. She acts as reviewer for national and international funding bodies, academic institutions and publishers.