President and Vice-Chancellor

Professor Colin Riordan BA PhD

The President and Vice-Chancellor is the University’s chief executive officer, with formal and wide-ranging responsibilities for the leadership and management of the University.

Professor Colin Riordan took up the post of President and Vice-Chancellor at Cardiff University 1st September 2012. Previously he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex appointed in October 2007. He moved to Essex from Newcastle University, where he had been Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Provost of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences since August 2005. Before joining Newcastle University, he taught at the then University of Wales, Swansea, and Julius-Maximilians Universität-Würzburg in Germany.

Professor Riordan taught English as a foreign language at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany (1982-84) and was Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in German at Swansea University (1986-1998). He became Professor of German at Newcastle University in 1998, where he remained until his move to Essex in 2007. He has published widely on post-war German literature and culture, including editing books on the writers Jurek Becker, Uwe Johnson and Peter Schneider. Other research interests include the history of environmental ideas in German culture.

He is an experienced and committed teacher and in 2009 he chaired the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s enquiry into teaching quality. He was Dean of Postgraduate Studies and Head of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Newcastle.

He is a Board member of Universities UK, the Edge Foundation and the Equality Challenge Unit, which supports equality and diversity for staff and students in higher education across all four nations of the UK. As chair of the International and European Policy Network of Universities UK, he is active in promoting and advancing the role of UK universities abroad.

Professor Colin Riordan
Email: V-C@cardiff.ac.uk

Contact via Personal Assitant: Sunita Farnham
Tel: 029 2087 4835
Email: FarnhamS@cardiff.ac.uk