Professor Viv Ellis is currently based at the University College London Institute of Education where he is an Honorary Professor with the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, completing several funded research projects. From 2020 to 2025, he was Dean of the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Australia’s largest and leading Faculty of Education and one of the most dynamic, research-intensive faculties of Education, Counselling and Psychology in the world. During his tenure, he led the restructuring of the Faculty as well as a major programme of cultural transformation that resulted in Education becoming the highest performing Faculty in the University’s 2024 ‘Your Say’ engagement survey, reflecting a highly inclusive and supportive working environment. He also led the diversification of the Faculty’s course offer leading to considerable improvements in financial performance and student satisfaction as well as in international rankings (ARWU, US News and World Report, THE) and research performance. In 2022, he was appointed by the Governor-in-Council as an inaugural non-executive director of the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership, a unique cross-sectoral public body offering professional development in school leadership and teaching to all schools (state and private) in Victoria, Australia.

Viv Ellis is a global expert on teacher education, having worked with government agencies and NGOs across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Helsinki and an adviser to the Finnish Teacher Education Forum. Between 2020 and 2025, he led numerous  major research and development projects (supporting reforms to initial teacher education, curriculum and professional developments) for governments in the Middle East. With Dr Ian Cushing, he is also leading a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust research project on the affective dimensions of teacher education reform in England.

Prior to Monash, he was the founding Co-Director of the Centre for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development, a strategic partnership between King’s College London and Teachers College, Columbia University in New York and also a member of the Advisory Panel for Teacher Education for the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.

Professor Ellis’s research has been funded by international governments; the British Academy; the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Norwegian Research Council; the Higher Education Academy; the Mayor of London’s Schools Excellence Fund; the Rackham Foundation; and the Society for Educational Studies. He has worked with interdisciplinary teams of researchers across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and health. He has served on the editorial boards of leading international journals and was a member of the Education panel for the 2014 Hong Kong Research Assessment Exercise. Since 2020, he has raised over AUD$14 million in international contract revenue, including nearly AUD$7 million for R&D projects he has led personally.

Recent books have included the anthology Teacher Education in Crisis: The State, the Market and the Universities in England which, since its publication as an e-book in September 2023, has been the fastest downloaded Open Access academic publication ever for Bloomsbury Academic and has been nominated for the 2024 BERA Research Book of the Year award by Bloomsbury itself. His latest book (with Lauren Gatti and Warwick Mansell) The New Political Economy of Teacher Education: The Enterprise Narrative and the Shadow State has been described by Michael Apple as ‘a significant contribution [that] should be read by everyone who is deeply concerned about the present and future of teacher education’. It has been nominated for the 2024 Critic’s Choice Award for the American Educational Studies Association.

From 2002 to 2013, Viv worked in the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University, where he co-convened the Centre for Sociocultural and Activity Theory Research (OSAT) and was a Fellow of St Cross College. He remains active in Cultural-Historical Theory research networks and is the author of one of the most downloaded articles in one of this field’s key journals, Mind, Culture and Activity.

‘This website is my personal-professional blog and the views expressed are entirely my own. Posts are usually categorised under the following headings: Publications (new books or articles, including those of friends and colleagues); Events (in which I am participating or have organised); Research (new projects or related information); Blog (*very* occasional rambles, diatribes, paeans, tributes, laments, wtfs, etc.). The Twitter account associated with this blog is used primarily as a WordPress tool and for research purposes.

Key interests represented in the posts on the site are: teacher education and development (institutional structures, history, program design, policy, politics and professional learning; cultural-historical and activity theory (ways of thinking about human development derived from Soviet psychology – Vygotsky & Co; western cultural psychology – Scribner, Cole & friends; and anthropology –  cognitive and otherwise); Language and literacy (across educational settings – with particular interests in the subject English, writing, reading and talk); and comparative studies of education (and specifically education policies related to teacher development, with a particular interest in the United States and the Nordic countries).’