Connect
About
My work explores the ways in which societies conceive of justice and punish wrongdoers, using sociological, cultural, historical and comparative approaches.
I have written on the Ireland’s use of Magdalene laundries, southern theory, comparative study of punishment, and the contemporary histories of Irish and Scottish prison systems - for which I received the Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize (2022) and the Brian Williams’ Prize (2020) for the best criminological article from an emerging scholar.
My books include The Politics of Punishment and the Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland. With Penguin, I published The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland's Legacy of Silence. This was awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn Prize for new non-fiction and has been widely and positively reviewed in outlets such as The Guardian, TLS, Irish Times, Irish Independent, The Observer, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times, iPaper, and the Mail on Sunday.
Along with traditional academic writing, I am especially keen on the arts and how they can communicate research and engage the public. In 2023, I was named as one of the BBC’s New Generation Thinkers, and made a radio essay, The Legacies of the Laundries, based on my work. My longform essays have appeared in The Irish Independent and History Extra Magazine. I co-wrote a script for a piece of dance theatre The Ireland We Dreamed Of, shown in Dublin in 2024. I worked in collaboration with visual artist Sinead McCann to make two sculptural pieces that were shown in the exhibition What Does It Mean to Know?
I have won fellowships from various funders, including an ESRC New Investigator grant and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Fellowship. I have also held a Nominated Fellowship at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fulbright Scholarship to study at UC Berkeley.
With Marion Vannier, I am Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal, and I am an international associate editorial board member at Punishment & Society, and on the editorial boards of The British Journal of Criminology and Law & Society Review.
With Dr Colette Barry (UCD) I am currently undertaking a history of Irish prison officers, funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme small grant fund.
Teaching
Postgraduate Courses