Leeds Historical Criminology Seminar #4

Rethinking the Death Penalty: Mitigation, Abolition and After

2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the permanent abolition of the death penalty for murder in Great Britain. To mark the occasion, the fourth event in the Leeds Historical Criminology Seminar Series will provide an opportunity to examine the past, present and future of the death penalty.

The event will bring together academics, activists, students and others to discuss inter-related issues, including the historical realities of the death penalty in mid-twentieth century Britain, the rise of abolition in the USA, as well as the policy of the current UK government towards the use of the death penalty overseas.

It will feature presentations from Dr Lizzie Seal (University of Sussex), Dr Vivien Miller (University of Nottingham) and Frances Crook OBE (Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform).

The event will conclude with a roundtable that enables participants to discuss the past and present of capital punishment worldwide, as well as its future. This is a free event and it is open to the public.

The event takes place at Leeds Beckett University on the 19th June. Please register via Eventbrite here.

Scientific American, 1888 via WikimediaCommons

  

The ESRC and the Futures of Criminological Research: A BSC/CCJ Symposium

Save the Date - from the BSC Bulletin

The BSC, in conjunction with its journal Criminology & Criminal Justice is holding an afternoon symposium in Edinburgh on the 5th of April about what the future holds for criminological research.

Speakers will include Richard Sparks, who was last year commissioned by the ESRC to write a  think-piece on the future directions and possibilities in research on crime and justice which is due to be published shortly; the President Elect of the BSC Sandra Walklate; BSC Vice President Pam Davies; and the CCJ editors in chief. 

The programme will include plenty of time for discussion and debate.

Tickets are available via Eventbrite.

"The Great Procession and Women's Demonstration" Princes Street, Edinburgh, 9th October, 1909. Photograph by James Patrick, 1863 - 1933 via WikiCommons. 

  

Registration Open for #HCNet Conference

Provisional programme announced

#HCNet are pleased to announce the provisional programme and registration details for the first Historical Criminology Network conference, to be held 9-10 April 2019 at the University of Plymouth.

We originally posted about the conference here.

Click here to register, registration is free. The link also includes information on travel, hotel booking and an optional evening meal. Please ensure that you register for the conference by Friday 22 March.
  
If you have any queries, or require any further information about the conference, please don’t hesitate to contact organisers David Churchill or Iain Channing. Their info is available on our Members page.

The programme may be subject to minor revisions ahead of the conference. Click below to download the most up-to-date version (21 March 2019) via GoogleDrive (sign-in not required). 

  

SSHA CFP Deadline Update

Social Science History Association Conference, Chicago 2019

Glenn Svedin of the SSHA Crime, Justice and the Law Network informs us that the submission deadline in response to the Call for Papers has been moved from 16 February to 1 March. A new submission system has been introduced. More information can be found here.


We previously posted about this conference here. It will be held in Chicago, Illinois, USA on 21-24 November. The overall conference theme is 'Data and its Discontents,' the full Call for Papers is here (PDF link) - Graduate Travel Grants are available. The Network Call for Papers can be found below as an image, alternatively a copy is available here via Google Drive (no sign-in required).


If you're planning a session and seeking participants, why not use the comments on this page? They are moderated to prevent spam but the mailbox is regularly attended.

#HCNet Chair shortlisted for book prize

Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Theory and History Prize

Historical Criminology Network Chair David Churchill’s book has been shortlisted for the 2019 Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Theory and History Prize. The Prize is awarded annually ‘for a book that makes a contribution to socio-legal theory or socio-legal history’.

David’s book – Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City: The Police and the Public – was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. It advances a new interpretation of urban policing and crime control in the era of the new police, stressing the role of the civilian public in dealing with crime on their own terms. Further information about the book is available here. 

The winner of the Prize will be announced at the SLSA annual conference, University of Leeds, on 4 April 2019. For the full list of shortlisted works for this year’s SLSA prizes, click here. 

Cover of D. Churchill, Crime Control and Everyday Life in the Victorian City (OUP, 2017).

  

Confronting the ‘violence of the archive’: crime, punishment and the modern state

Workshop and Call for Papers

Historical Criminology Network members Dr Kate West and Dr Thomas Guiney have announced an event they are organising which will be held at Oxford Brookes University on 22 May 2019. They say

"This 1-day workshop will confront the inherent ‘violence of the archive’ as a key site of collective ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’. It will consider the various ways in which the modern state has produced, and subsequently projected knowledge with regards to crime and punishment.

Drawing upon insights from the growing field of historical criminology this workshop will explore this dynamic to encourage new perspectives on the relationship between state and (non-)citizen within criminal justice settings; the lived experiences of individuals subject to state authority; the inner workings of closed penal institutions; and aspects of the penal policy-making cycle which remain hidden from public view. 

Participants will consider the inherent challenges of using state-sanctioned primary sources that risk obscuring, silencing and reconfiguring lived experience and counter-memories. Accordingly, the temporal scope of this workshop is book-ended by the ‘birth’ of the modern state and the ambiguities of contemporary statehood."

More information and the full call for papers can be found here. The deadline for submissions is 29 March. Both event and CFP deadline can be found in our new calendar, by clicking on the 'Events' tab above. 

City of Oxford: panoramic view of the High Street with views of the colleges and churches. Etching by H. Toussaint. Via Wellcome Images CC-BY-4.0

  

Social Science History Association Conference 2019

Call for Papers

The Crime, Justice and the Law Network of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) invites proposals for the network's sessions at the 44th annual meeting of the SSHA, November 21-24, 2019, at Palmer House Hotel, Chicago, Illinois. They say:

"The network includes historians, sociologists, economists, criminologists, geographers, legal scholars, and others who are interested in the history of crime, policing and the law. The network’s purpose is to provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas and research across disciplines and methodologies. The network prides itself in having a global approach to research on criminality and/or judicial and legal systems and encourages comparative perspectives on these subjects. It welcomes critical work on the processes through which the state, through various social control institutions and frontline agencies, evaluates, categorizes and regulates its subjects. Themes involving, for instance, police, violence, asylum, victimization, state power and regulation, crime and societal changes, gender, race, and processes of evaluation and categorization, are welcome."

To submit a proposal, and for more information on the meeting, visit the SSHA website. The deadline for submissions is February 16, 2019.

UPDATE: On 5 February 2019 the CFP Deadline was changed, click here for more information.

Chicago Fog Down by the Water, 1969 by David Sk via seemsartless.com CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Prison Abolition in the UK

CCJS Conference

The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has announced a conference on Prison Abolition in the UK hosted by the Harm & Evidence Research Collaborative at The Open University and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, in partnership with Professor Joe Sim of Liverpool John Moores University.

The major two day conference plans to discuss the past, present and future of prison abolition across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will be held on Thursday 23rd and Friday 24th May, at The Open University campus in Milton Keynes. More information can be found on the conference page on their website.

'Victorian Wing' Kilmainham Gaol, 2013 by Miguel Mendez via Flickr CC-BY-2.0

European Social Science History Conference 2020

Call for Papers

The International Institute of Social History (IISH) has opened pre-registration and invites proposals for papers and sessions at the Thirteenth European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) to be held in Leiden, Netherlands on Wednesday 18th to Saturday 21st March 2020.

ESSHC aims to 'bring together scholars who explain historical phenomena using the methods of the social sciences.' This lively biennial conference features international speakers arranged by networks. The last two conferences, at Belfast in 2018 and Valencia in 2016, saw many high-quality papers from members of the ESSHC Criminal Justice Network, many of whom are also members of #HCNet, the Historical Criminology Network. 

The ESSHC Criminal Justice Network explores all aspects of crime, policing, justice and punishment in all societies, but with a particular focus on the early-modern and modern periods. 

Please feel free to use the comments below if you would like to find other scholars to put together a session proposal. More information, including the call for papers, can be found here.

Leiden, Netherlands ca.1954 by railasia via Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

  

The Role of the Intelligent Machine in Organized Crime

Interdisciplinary Research Event

The Centre for Applied Legal Research is funding an event at Bristol Law School on Wednesday 30th January 2019 called 'The Role of the Intelligent Machine in Organized Crime' and invites interested scholars from any discipline to attend. 

The event will be held 12:30-17:00 in Room 4X113, Frenchay Campus, Bristol Law School, UWE Bristol. Registration is required but it is free to attend and lunch and refreshments will be provided. For more information click here.

Electronics Engineer Sharon Hogge with HT3 and ROBART I robots, 1983. US Public Domain.

Research in Progress: ESRC Victims Project

Victims’ Access to Justice through English Criminal Courts, 1675 to the present

#HCNet is eager to share information on current research-in-progress that might interest members, celebrating our colleagues' achievements and keeping up-to-date with current work and future directions of Historical Criminology.

The ESRC Victims Project started in August 2018 and runs for 24 months funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The Research Team includes Historical Criminologists from the Universities of Essex, Leeds Beckett, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, led by Principal Investigator Prof Pamela Cox (Essex). 

Their website explains: 

'This interdisciplinary project explores patterns of victims’ access to justice in England over three centuries using a unique combination of long-run historical and recent data to meet three research objectives:

• to profile victims who engaged in criminal trials in England, 1675 to the present
• to track changing combinations of the rights, resources and services available to these victims
• to use this new data to recommend ways of understanding and reducing ‘justice gaps’ today and in the future.'

Visit esrcvictims.org for more details including the full project outline, publications and events.  

What are you working on? Please email Alexa Neale via our Members page or Tweet using the hashtag #HCNet.

Court sitting trying prisoners in the Old Bailey (etching) via Wellcome V0041657 CC-BY-4.0

  

Research in Progress: Criminal Characters

Investigating the lives of historical offenders in Australia

#HCNet is eager to share information on current research-in-progress that might interest members, celebrating our colleagues' achievements and keeping up-to-date with current work and future directions of Historical Criminology. 


The Criminal Characters project started in 2018 and continues through to 2022 supported by a grant from the University of Technology Sydney. #HCNet members may recall Tweets and emails circulating from Principal Investigator and Chancellors Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Alana Piper, when she sent out a call earlier this year for survey participants.


Alana explains:
'Crime has been central in shaping the history and society of Australia, and historical criminal figures are an ongoing source of fascination to the Australian public. The Criminal Characters project is examining who criminals were, and who they have been imagined to be, in order to deconstruct both historical and contemporary understandings of ‘the criminal’ as a form of social identity. 


This is being achieved by creating an online database of biographic and criminal career information for offenders who entered Victoria’s prison system from the 1850s to 1940s, utilising crowdsourcing to transcribe the detailed life histories kept in Victoria’s prison registers. The prison records that public volunteers are transcribing on the Criminal Characters website captures demographic information such as age, occupation, nationality and marital status, the prisoner’s convictions across time, and information about their appearance, family, misbehaviour inside prison and any transfers they had to other types of institutions. 


How do the lives revealed in such records challenge public conceptions of the sorts of characters that end up in the criminal justice system? And how can such crowdsourcing projects contribute to a greater literacy in historical criminology among the general public?'


Visit criminalcharacters.com for more information including how to participate in transcription. The site includes an excellent Resources page for any one curious about the history of crime in Australian society and culture, including a guide to understanding Australian crime records. 


What are you working on? Please email Alexa Neale via our Members page or Tweet using the hashtag #HCNet.

Image copyright Alana Piper and criminalcharacters.com

  

Historical Criminology Conference 2019

Call for papers

UPDATE 19TH FEBRUARY 2019: The Call for Papers is now closed but registration for the event is now open and a provisional programme available here.

#HCNet are pleased to announce the inaugural event of the BSC Historical Criminology Network, in association with the BSC South West Branch. The conference will take place at the University of Plymouth on 9-10 April 2019. It seeks to advance the Network’s aim to promote, develop and embed historical approaches to criminology.

'Linking past and present in criminological research'

Confirmed plenary speakers include Prof Barry Godfrey (University of Liverpool) and Dr Kate Lister (Leeds Trinity University).The Historical Criminology Network invites proposals for papers discussing connections between past and present in crime and/or criminal justice (both broadly conceived). Presenters at all career stages are welcome. Papers which engage with multiple disciplinary perspectives, or which derive from interdisciplinary collaboration, are especially encouraged. Papers may address connections between past and present in a variety of ways, including (but not limited to) a focus on:

• The historical origins of contemporary problems
• Parallels between past and present
• The role of history and memory in public understanding of crime and justice  
• The status of the present as an historical period
• The uses of history for criminological theory
• ‘Historic’ crimes/injustices and their contemporary legacies

To submit a paper, please send a 200 word abstract to David Churchill (d.churchill [at] leeds [dot] ac [dot] uk) by Friday 8 February 2019. If you have any questions, please contact David in the first instance. 

Plymouth, 1960 by Brian Clift via geograph.org CC-BY-SA-2.0

  

Job Opportunity: Fellow, Stanford University

Fellowship for recently completed PhDs

The Center for Law and History at Stanford University, California, has announced a job opportunity. They say: 

'This fellowship is intended for people who have recently completed (or will soon complete) their training in law and history and who seek thereafter to pursue their first tenure-track academic position at the intersection of the two fields.'

The application deadline is 15th February 2019. Click here to find out more.

Black & White Justice (Iowa Judicial Building), 2014 by Phil Roeder via Flickr CC-BY-2.0

  

BSC Conference 2019

Dates and theme announced

Members of the BSC Historical Criminology Network look forward to meeting at the annual conference of the British Society of Criminology, which in 2019 will be held from the 2nd to the 5th of July at the University of Lincoln. This year the theme will be ‘Public Criminologies: Communities, Conflict and Justice’. More information can be found on the BSC website’s conference page here.

The call for abstracts opens on 7th of January 2019 when our blog will publish a reminder. The deadline for abstracts is 17th of May 2019. Feel free to comment below if you are planning a panel and looking for participants.

'The Victorian Prison - inside Lincoln Castle' (2015) by bvi4092 via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Leeds Historical Criminology Seminar

‘Funding Justice or Fuelling Crime? The Political Economy of Crime and Justice in Historical Perspective’

The next meeting of the Leeds Historical Criminology Seminar will take place on Friday, the 25th of January 2019, at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds. 

Featuring presentations from Pam Cox (University of Essex), Ruth Lamont (University of Manchester), Stephen Farrall (University of Sheffield) and Zelia Gallo (King’s College London), the event will focus on the interconnections between politics, the economy, crime and criminal justice through time.

Lunch is included and prior registration is essential. Click here for more information. 

Phrenological head of Robert Peel... by John Doyle via Wellcome Collection. CC-BY-4.0.

  

Prison Service Journal special edition planned

Call for expressions of interest

Professor Alyson Brown, member of the editorial board for The Prison Service Journal, has described their interest in publishing a special historical edition. She asks for anyone whose research is prison-related and interested in contributing to the special edition to contact her. Her institutional profile and contact details can be found here.

The Prison Service Journal is peer-reviewed and published by HM Prison Service of England and Wales. It is hosted by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies who describe the journal’s purpose as ‘to promote discussion on issues related to the work of the Prison Service, the wider criminal justice system and associated fields’. It publishes short articles of up to 4000 words and is Open Access. More about the journal can be found here.

If you’d like to take a look at a previous edition that has included historical material, Alyson suggests this link (PDF).

Burial ground at Millbank Prison from Mayhew and Binny (1862) Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life via Wikimedia Commons

Special issue call for submissions

Access to Justice: Historical Approaches to Victims of Crime

A special issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal Societies (ISSN 2075-4698) has been announced. The title is ‘Access to Justice: Historical Approaches to Victims of Crime’.

Edited by Pam Cox and Barry Godfrey, it aims to address issues of victims’ access to justice, cultural representations of victims, and the role of victims in the politics and practice of criminal justice – all in historical perspective.

Major research questions include:

• How has victims’ access to justice been facilitated or restricted over the past two centuries?

• How, and to what end, have cultural representations shaped perceptions of victims?

• How, why and when did victims come to shape political and criminal justice discourse and practice?

Additionally, related topics may include: Child sexual abuse victims; domestic violence victims; access to justice for victims; history of victim support; symbolic and ideal victims of crime; victims and fear of crime; victims and media representations; and victims in literature.

Submissions are due to the journal by 28 February 2019 and full details are available here.

Extract from film poster for 'The Victim' (1916) published in Variety, via Wikimedia Commons.

  

Clive Emsley Prize Winner 2018

Angela Sutton-Vane wins at BCHS2018

The British Crime Historians Symposium is a biennial conference that has become one of the most significant events for Historical Criminologists in the UK with its focus on all aspects of the history of crime, law, justice, punishment and social regulation. In 2018 it was held at Edge Hill University and nominations were invited for the Clive Emsley Prize for the best postgraduate paper presented there.

In November 2018, organisers Alyson Brown and Alana Barton were pleased to announce that the prize had been awarded to Angela Sutton-Vane of the Open University for her paper titled ‘The private life of CID paperwork: the transition of murder files from institutional to public records’. See below for the paper abstract. More about Angela’s research can be found on her website at angelasuttonvane.com

Were you at BCHS2018? Feel free to carry on the conversation about Angela's paper using the comments below.

Abstract: ‘There are a handful of cultural and historical studies of the British detective such as Haia Shpayer-Makov and Clive Emsley’s 2006 edited book and Dick Hobbs’ 1998 anthropological study.  Although some research has included the attitude of police to paperwork, work around the personal relationships between detectives, their bureaucracies and the paperwork they produce are lacking.  Often viewed with suspicion both from within their own institution and the public, and periodically entangled in moral crises, C.I.D. have pushing at their door an insatiable demand for access to their world.  The availability of records for research forms the crux of the historian’s ability to understand the detective and yet the growing legalisation of the police record has resulted in decreasing quantities appearing in the public domain.   As such my research sits at the historical coal-face and referring to material culture, specifically object biographies, the murder file has been identified as an exemplar in that it forms the apex of police work.  Its life, liminality and protean nature will be traced as it moves through changing fields of cultural and legal meanings involving control of information, institutional and personal pride, resistance to regulation, memory, memorialisation of the victims and notoriety.  These complex biographies have meant that murder files often moved into unregulated territory and, during a brief period of time, were appearing in local archives creating whole new sets of ethical dilemmas around access and interpretation. Ultimately, by better understanding the transition of the murder file from institutional to public record, research aims to re-open the debate around the wider issue of the preservation of criminal justice history.’

Bury St Edmunds Police ca. 1900 via Wikimedia Commons attributed to Bury Past and Present Society, Spanton-Jarman Collection

  

Race, Gender and Bourgeois Respectability

The execution of Percy Clifford, 1914

Historical Criminology Network Members Lizzie Seal and Alexa Neale were recently published in Volume 60 of the peer-reviewed academic journal The Irish Jurist.

Their article ‘Race, gender and bourgeois respectability: the execution of Percy Clifford, 1914’ is the first output to be published from the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Race, Racialisation and the Death Penalty in England and Wales, 1900-1965’. 

You can access the article via Westlaw.ie and Westlaw UK. Find out more about the project on the website here, including a post about Percy Clifford. Feel free to share your thoughts on the article or the case by commenting below.

Abstract: ‘This article is a microhistory of the capital case of Percy Clifford, a man of colour who was hanged for the murder of his wife Maud in England in 1914. It examines both what this case reveals about his life as a man of colour in Edwardian England and the racialised ways in which he was portrayed in the criminal justice system. It argues that understandings of bourgeois respectability, which were interwoven with notions of race, gender, class and sexuality, were significant to how the case was portrayed and interpreted.'

Fog - © Free-Photos CC0 Creative Commons via Communes.com