Project Advisory Board

We are very pleased to be able to draw on the experience and knowledge of:

Ian O'Donnell, Professor of Criminology, School of Law at University College Dublin. He completed a six-year term as Director of the UCD Institute of Criminology in December 2010. Previously, Professor O'Donnell was Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (1997-2000) and Research Officer at the Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research (1992-1997). During his time in England he served as a member of the Board of Visitors for HMP Pentonville and as a Magistrate on the Oxford bench. Professor O'Donnell is an Adjunct Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford; a Chartered Psychologist and Fellow of the British Psychological Society; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; a Member of the Academia Europaea; and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. His books include Prisoners, Solitude, and Time (2014) and with Eoin O' Sullivan Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents (2012).

Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Associate Dean, Research and Senior Lecturer at the University of Tasmania, Dr Maxwell-Stewart is an academic expert on convict life in Australia who teaches History and Classics. Born in Nigeria, raised in England, and schooled at the University of Edinburgh, he migrated to Tasmania in 1996 where he is now internationally recognised for his work on the history of convict transportation. He has published a number of books on the subject, most notably Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives (2001) with Lucy Frost for which they won the inaugural Kay Daniels award, and Closing Hells Gates: Death of a Convict Station (2008).

Clare Anderson, Professor of History at the University of Leicester. With interests in colonialism and colonial societies across the British Empire, her research centres on the Indian Ocean during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is especially interested in the history of confinement and has worked on prisons, penal colonies, plantations, and migrant ships. Clare held an ESRC Research Fellowship between 2002 and 2006, for work on nineteenth-century British penal settlements and currently is PI on a major ERC grant for a project on 'The Carceral Archipelago: transnational circulations in global perspective, 1415-1960' (2013-18). She is editor of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and author of Legible Bodies: Race, Criminality and Colonialism in South Asia (2004) and numerous articles on penal colonies, forced labour and the history of anthropology, photography and the body.

Woody Caan, Professor of Public Health, Department of Child and Family Health, at Anglia Ruskin University, Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences, Representative for Public Health research in the NHS R&D Forum. Professor Caan is editor of the Journal of Public Mental Health. He has expertise in: alcohol and drugs, especially family and community aspects of substance use. He advises the All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Misuse; and health in socially excluded groups such as children in care, refugees, young offenders and travelling communities; and the contribution of the voluntary and community sector to health.

Anita Dockley, research director of the Howard League for Penal Reform. She is responsible for developing the charity’s research capacity, forging links with academics and universities, funders and partner organisations. Her own research interests include suicide and self-harm in prisons, women in prison and order and control in the prison environment.

Barry Godfrey, Professor of Social Justice, University of Liverpool, has over twenty years of experience in researching comparative criminology, particularly international crime history; desistence studies; and longitudinal studies of offending. Over that time he has received funding from the ESRC, Wellcome Trust, The Leverhulme Trust, Nuffield Foundation, the British Academy, and other funders, for projects on the treatment of dangerous or habitual offenders; private policing; violence in society; and sentencing patterns over long periods of time. His recent publications include Crime in England 1880-1945(2014) and with P. Lawrence, Crime and Justice Since 1750 (2014).