Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Professor Tom Lawson is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost at Northumbria University.

As Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost, Tom works closely with the Vice-Chancellor and the University Executive playing a major role in shaping and directing the delivery of the University’s Vision, Strategy and supporting plans.

Tom provides strategic academic leadership for the University, responsible for the academic staff base and the academic portfolio and for leadership of the faculties through the line management of the Pro Vice-Chancellors who lead each faculty and our London Campus.

Working closely with the Chief Financial, Strategy, Information and People Officers, Tom leads the design and delivery of the University’s annual planning and resourcing process; the University’s commitment to improve the understanding of, and addressing, racial inequality and the University’s portfolio of major change projects.

Tom leads the continuous improvement in quality and performance of the University's offer, striving to ensure academic excellence and research intensity across the institution.

Tom is a historian of the Holocaust and more recently of colonial genocides. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was previously a Mid-Career Fellow of the British Academy.

He is the author and editor of several books on these subjects including The Church of England and the Holocaust (2006); with James Jordan, The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (2008); with Stephen Parker, God and War (2010); Debates on the Holocaust (2010) and The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (2014). Tom was co-editor of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History for 20 years until 2023.

Tom has recently published (with Andy Pearce from University College London) an edited collection on Britain and the Holocaust. He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled Empire of Genocide: The Extermination of Peoples in the British World.

Tom is a graduate of the Universities of York, Durham and Southampton. He was a first generation student in his family and went to school at Sawston Village College in Cambridgeshire, somewhere he returns every year to talk to students on Holocaust Memorial Day.

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