Research Overview

I joined the History department in Lancaster University in 2022, where I research and teach the digital history of crime, justice and punishment from eighteenth to twentieth century Britain. Over the past decade, my work has established new interdisciplinary approaches that combine history, osteoarchaeology, criminology and digital humanities to advance histories of crime, justice and punishment. Central to this work has been developing innovative ways of enhancing public engagement with digital history by creating open access digital archives that give the public direct and searchable access to some 35 billion words of primary sources evidencing the social history of modern Britain [Digital Panopticon, Convict Tattoos, Skin and Bone].

Recently, I was Principal Investigator on a British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Grant for ‘Skin and Bone’ which used data mining and data visualisations to chart the embodied experiences of injury, accidents, and interpersonal violence of 173,366 Londoners during the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1901. By merging ten disparate datasets from criminal, hospital and osteoarchaeological records, it demonstrated when, how and in what ways the physical body interacted with changing social identities and developed a new and 360-degree approach to the historical body during a crucial period of social, industrial and environmental change. These methods were initially developed through a British Academy-funded project, Analysing Convict Tattoos through Data Mining and Visualisations (2019), with Professor Robert Shoemaker (Sheffield), which extracted 76,000 descriptions of tattooed convicts and used data mining and visualisations to identify the cultural significance of tattooing in British society, 1791-1925. These methods have not only advanced histories of modern Britain, but are translatable for use in complex, multivariate data across various humanities and social sciences disciplines.

I’m currently developing a project with Dr Richard Ward (Exeter) which uses machine learning and data visualisation to examine deaths in prison custody, 1760-1925, and I'm writing a monograph on the history of femicide, violence and misogyny in Victorian England. I am Chief Editor of the SOLON Explorations in Crime and Criminal Justice book series. I enjoy writing and speaking for TV, radio and print, and my work has received coverage in the BBC, The Times, Independent, Observer, CNN and the Smithsonian. I also enjoy working and publishing with activist organisations and policy think tanks including Howard League for Penal Reform.