Hannah Westley

Since joining AUP in 2014. Dr Westley has taught for both the Communications, Media and Culture and Comparative Literature and English departments. As Program Coordinator for the Journalism program, she worked closely with students on student media before serving as Program Director for the Master of Arts in Global Communications between 2019 and 2022. On the recommendation of faculty, she became the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs before being appointed Interim Provost on August 1st 2023. 

Dr Westley completed her BA in Modern Languages and an MPhil in European Literature at the University of Cambridge. Her interdisciplinary PhD focused on the body in self-representation over the course of the twentieth century and examined how writers and artists, in the wake of the postmodern dissolution of the subject, sought out new, often surprising, multidimensional spaces for representing identity. 

Following a year’s post-doctoral study on an Entente Cordiale Scholarship, Dr Westley worked for a decade in journalism as a writer and editor for The Times, The Mail on Sunday and The London Paper. On relocating back to Paris, she taught in the French university system before coming to AUP. Her current research follows two lines of inquiry. The first stems from her early research and focuses on representations of the body online, in particular, the omnipresent ‘selfie.’ Her work considers how these online identities interact with traditional means of self-representation and how this affects the way we understand subjectivity and narrative. Westley’s second line of inquiry is influenced by her professional experience in the field of journalism. With a particular interest in comparative cultural perspectives on the changing nature of news production and distribution today, this research examines the nature of individualized news consumption online and asks what is the role of the journalist in an age of social media, churnalism and mobile devices. 

This coming year, Dr Westley will be working closely with leadership, faculty and staff to secure strategic initiatives and support faculty engagement in AUP’s vision for the future.