The Provost is the standing deputy to the Vice Chancellor and the Chief Academic Officer of the University, with responsibility for all of the University’s academic activities, including oversight of the nine Faculties. The Office of the Provost provides strategic leadership in all areas of academic policy, students and education, people & community, and Indigenous strategy and partnerships.
Nicola Phillips has been the Provost at the University of Melbourne since September 2021. Before arriving at Melbourne, she was Vice President & Vice Principal (Education) at King’s College London, with responsibility for King’s wide-ranging strategy for excellence and innovation in education and the student experience. She is a Professor of Political Economy.
Nicola was educated as an undergraduate at King’s, in Hispanic Studies, and then pursued her Master’s in Comparative Government and PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to returning to King’s later in her career as VP (Education), she held academic and later leadership positions at the Universities of Warwick, Manchester and Sheffield, including serving as the Head of the Department of Politics at Sheffield from 2014 to 2017. She has held visiting fellowships and professorships at a number of institutions across the world, including the Australian National University, the University of British Columbia, and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. She undertook the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School in 2019.
Nicola is a past President and Chair of the British International Studies Association (BISA), was a member of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) sub-panel for Politics and International Studies in 2014, and received the award of Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) in 2016. She was proud to be the 2018 recipient of the International Studies Association’s J. Ann Tickner Prize, which is awarded annually to ‘someone who, in Tickner’s footsteps, consistently combines bravery in pursuing high-quality, pioneering scholarship that pushes the boundaries of the discipline with a deep commitment to service, especially teaching and mentoring’.
With a strongly interdisciplinary orientation, Nicola’s academic interests lie in the areas of global political economy, global development and global economic governance. Her research has centred on the theme of inequality in the global political economy, and in recent years has focused particularly on production and global value chains, global migration, and labour standards and exploitation, including forced and child labour. She is currently completing a textbook, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023, designed for undergraduates coming to the field of global political economy for the first time.