Professor Karl Leydecker

Professor Karl Leydecker

Professor Karl Leydecker

Professor Karl Leydecker took up the role of Senior Vice-Principal in March 2019. He is responsible for providing direct line management to all Heads of School and ensuring the delivery of ambitious School plans and budgets. He has strategic oversight of the People, Digital and Estates Strategies and also the institutional strategic planning processes, including the Outcome Agreement with the Scottish Funding Council.

Karl was previously Vice-Principal (Learning and Teaching) and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at University of Dundee from 2013. Before that he was Dean of Humanities at the University of Kent for 6 years, having also served as a Head of School at Kent and before that University of Stirling. Karl studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, taking a BA in English and Modern Languages (including a year at the University of Passau) and a PhD in German (including two years at the University of Hamburg).

From 2017 until taking up his current role, Karl was the Theme Leader for the current QAA Scotland Enhancement Theme Evidence for Enhancement: Improving the Student Experience. He recently served as a reviewer for the Universities of Excellence initiative of the German Council for Science and Humanities, which will disperse €148M to Germany’s top 11 research universities over the next 7 years. Karl’s own research interests include marriage and divorce in German and European literature from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, and German drama and social history from 1890 to 1930.

In 2019 Karl was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in recognition of his record of university leadership.

Tel: +44 (0)1224 272017
Email: karl.leydecker@abdn.ac.uk

Personal Assistant: Suzanne Fleming
Tel: +44 (0)1224 272017
Email: suzanne.fleming@abdn.ac.uk