Personal statement

My research interests focus on the sociology of punishment, particularly comparative and historical study of penal cultures and penal politics. I joined Strathclyde in 2021 as a Chancellor's Fellow, having previously been the Policy and Public Affairs Manager at the Howard League Scotland. I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2017. During that time I was also a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley. My academic work has received a number of prizes. In 2021, my paper ‘Pastoral Penality’ received the best article prize in Theoretical Criminology, and my first article, 'Civilising Imprisonment', won the British Society of Criminology's best article prize for a paper produced by a new scholar. In 2023, I was named as one of the BBC/AHRC’s New Generation Thinkers, who are ‘ten of the UK’s most promising arts and humanities early career researchers’. You can listen to my episode of BBC THE ESSAY "the legacies of the laundries" here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0hl8r79#:~:text=From%201922%2C%20between%. I am leading an ESRC New Investigator Grant funded study of Magdalene Laundries in Ireland, "Mass Decarceration: A critical social history'. As part of this, I worked with artists who developed a piece of dance theatre, "The Ireland we Dreamed of" that ran in Dublin to much audience acclaim. In 2024, I signed a contract with The Bodley Head (UK) and Simon and Schuster (US) for a tradebook based on this research. With Dr Colette Barry (UCD) I am also undertaking a history of Irish prison officers, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme small grant fund. My books include "The Politics of Punishment" and the "Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland". I am an international associate editorial board member at Punishment & Society, and on the editorial boards of The British Journal of Criminology, Law & Society Review.