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Syllabus

Please note that this is an indicative syllabus. The precise content will be negotiated between students and tutor each academic year to reflect student interests.

Archive workshops:

  • Autumn term: Modern Records Centre (Howard League for Penal Reform materials)
  • Spring term: Warwick Records Office (Quarter sessions materials)

Seminar topics:

  • Introduction - historiography of prisons
  • Institutions: prisons, workhouses, asylums
  • Representations of crime: literature and the press
  • Crime, metropole, empire: transportation
  • Sex work and crime
  • Juvenile delinquency
  • Bad girls: femininity and crime
  • Serial killers and moral panics
  • Sedition, libel, protest: political crime
  • Justice and humanitarian reform
  • Upper class vs underclass criminality
  • Policing and detection: from Peelers to Poirot?