Meet the team behind The Persistence of the Victorian Prison project.
Dominique Moran is Professor of Carceral Geography in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is interested in the relationship between people and places, and she brings this perspective to the prison, focusing on the lived experience of prison spaces, and the ways in which prison buildings influence those who live and work in them, and vice versa.
Matt Houlbrook is Professor of Cultural History in the Department of History, at the University of Birmingham, UK. He works on the cultural history of 20th century Britain, with particular interests in histories of gender and sexuality, space and identity, and the relationship between culture, crime, and politics.
Yvonne Jewkes is Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences, at the University of Bath. Her main research interests are prison architecture, design and technology, and how they can assist in rehabilitating offenders, enhancing prisoners’ quality of life and wellbeing, reducing trauma, improving prisoner-staff relations, and making prison staff feel like a professionalised and valued workforce.
Eleanor March
Eleanor March was Research Fellow in Interdisciplinary Prison Research in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Birmingham until the end of 2022. Her research has an interdisciplinary focus, working across literature, carceral geography, criminology and history. Whilst part of the project team, Eleanor undertook oral history interviews, discourse analysis of prison literature, and supported qualitative research in prison, as well as leading on project communications, social media and the website. She is lead author of a paper from the project: Defining the Carceral Characteristics of the ‘Dickensian prison’: A Corpus Stylistics Analysis of Dickens’s Novels forthcoming in Victoriographies.
Jennifer Turner is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, at the University of Birmingham, UK; and a human geographer at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Her research focuses upon spaces and practices of incarceration, past and present. Most recently, she has interrogated prison architecture, design, technology and their potential to impact upon rehabilitation. Other interests include penal tourism, articulations of the prison boundary and conceptualisations of carceral space. Her work has been published widely in the fields of carceral geography and criminology.
The Persistence of the Victorian Prison 