Professor Tim Dunne, Provost and Senior Vice-President

Professor Tim Dunne is the Provost and Senior Vice-President at Monash University.

In his role at Monash, Professor Dunne provides leadership of the University's 10 faculties. He oversees the development, implementation and continuous improvement of the University’s quest for excellence within the globally competitive and dynamic landscape of higher education.

Professor Dunne joined Monash from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, where he served as Provost (2022-2025) and as Interim President and Vice-Chancellor (May–September 2025). In the role of Provost at Surrey, Professor Dunne collaborated with faculty leaders to develop and deliver an integrated suite of policies that enhanced academic performance. He subsequently took on responsibility for improving that institution’s global rankings, steering the university to an immediate improvement. He was also instrumental in implementing stronger budgetary controls, resulting in an enhancement of their financial resilience.

Before joining the University of Surrey, Professor Dunne held executive leadership roles at the University of Queensland for more than 10 years. There he served as Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (2010-2013). Executive Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (2014-2017), and Deputy Provost (2018-2021). Previously he held leadership roles at the University of Exeter where he had the opportunity to work closely with his long-standing mentor Sir Steve Smith during his presidency of the university.

In recognition of his significant scholarly contributions, Professor Dunne has been honoured as an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (United Kingdom), the Academy of Social Sciences (Australia), and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. An eminent global authority in the field of international relations, Professor Dunne has achieved global recognition for his research in human rights protection and foreign policy-making in a changing world order. He has written and co-edited 17 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 Globalisation of International Society (2017), a co-edited re-issue of the classic text Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (2019), and most recently, The Rise of the International (2024).

He is a graduate of the University of Oxford, holding both a Master’s degree and Doctor of Philosophy in International Relations.

Outside of work, Tim is an avid football fan and follows Manchester United through thick and thin. He also finds endless inspiration in public squares where you can watch culture and history collide.