Professor Tim Dunne

Tim was appointed to the role of Provost and Senior Vice-President in 2022, and is responsible for leading the Faculties and Institutes in delivering the University’s academic mission. In his capacity as Provost, he performs the following duties (among others): chair of Senate, chair of University Promotions Committee, chair and sponsor of Optimising Academic Achievement, chair of Executive Board Academic Leaders’ Group, chair of Academic Leaders’ Forum, member of the Executive Board, member of Council, and is the University lead on Free Speech and Academic Freedom.  He is also the standing deputy to the Vice-Chancellor. 

Tim brings to the role of Provost more than 30 years’ experience as an educator. Prior to his move to Surrey, Tim had a number of leadership roles at The University of Queensland (UQ), including Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Deputy Provost. He concurrently continued to be an active researcher and teacher in the School of Political Science. Tim previously held discipline and Faculty-level leadership roles at the University of Exeter and Aberystwyth University. His graduate training was at the University of Oxford where he won a national prize for his PhD.

Tim is recognised for his research on human rights protection and foreign policy-making in a changing world order. He has written and co-edited fifteen books, including Human Rights in Global Politics (1999), Worlds in Collision (2002), Terror in our Time (2012), The Oxford Handbook of the Responsibility to Protect (2016), the prize-winning collection The Globalization of International Society (2017), co-edited a re-issue of a classic text by Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight called Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (2019), and most recently, The Rise of the International (2024). Along with remaining active in writing and publishing, Tim provides occasional graduate classes on intervention and international relations theory. 

During his academic career, Tim has co-edited both the Review of International Studies and the European Journal of International Relations. He has also co-edited two of the biggest selling textbooks in International Relations both published by Oxford University Press across multiple editions:  Foreign Policy: Theories, Actors, Cases and International Relations Theories. Tim is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia and holds an Emeritus Professorship at The University of Queensland.  In 2024 he was appointed a Governor to the Farnborough College of Technology and Chairs the Risk and Audit Committee.

Tim publishes commentaries on Higher Education in the Times Higher Education, and posts blogs and news item on his LinkedIn page.