About Kent

Pro-Vice-Chancellor External

Professor Alexandra Hughes

alex hughes

Responsibilities

As Pro-Vice-Chancellor External, Prof Hughes leads the University's Internationalisation and Student Experience strategies. She is responsible for the University's international and European activities, Information Services, Student Services and the Centre for English and World Languages (CEWL), as well as Kent's centres in Brussels and Paris. The following department heads report to Prof Hughes:

Professor Hughes is also the Equality and Diversity champion for race/ethnicity.

She was formerly Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Quality and Students at the University of Birmingham and before that, she was Head of the School of Humanities and Professor of Twentieth-Century French Literature at the University.

Academic career

Prof Hughes is also Professor of French and a member of the research staff in the School of European Culture and Languages.

Professor Hughes’ research interests centre on questions of identity, and have included twentieth-century French prose fiction, life writing, women's writing, visual culture, gender studies and issues of culture-contact. She has published on Violette Leduc, Simone de Beauvoir, Serge Doubrovsky, Hervé Guibert, modern French autobiography, and post-war gay and lesbian writing. In 1999, her study of gender issues (Heterographies: Sexual Difference in French Autobiography) was awarded the French Studies RH Gapper book prize. She co-edited the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture, as well as collections of essays on gender and French film and the intersections of photography and narrative. Her research has most recently focused on French perceptions of China. Her last book was France/China: Intercultural Imaginings.

Corporate Communications

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Last Updated: 26/11/2012