We are delighted to announce that we have funding for a three-year PhD studentship, based at the University of Sheffield.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of both new forms of policing and ideas about habitual criminality. Taking advantage of the extensive records of both petty and serious crime digitised and linked together by the Digital Panopticon project, this studentship will investigate these phenomena from the perspective of the judicial records, by tracing the incidence and character of criminal prosecutions. The project will seek to understand the extent to which prosecutions at the Old Bailey resulted from patterns of underlying criminal activity, repeat offending, and/or the actions of prosecutors and the police in identifying previously identified ‘suspicious characters’. The student may wish to focus on identifying the social and cultural factors which made some Londoners prone to reoffending and rearrest, or examining the impact of changing methods of policing on patterns of prosecutions, or analysing the relationship between the chronology of repeat prosecutions and the evolution of contemporary thought about reoffending. This research will allow the student to draw conclusions about the causes of crime, the impact of the new police, and the background to nineteenth-century thought about crime. The topic will appeal to researchers interested in the history of crime and policing and the social history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England more generally.
The award will cover the cost of UK/EU tuition fees and provide an annual maintenance grant at the standard RCUK rate (full-time rate £13,863 for 2014-15) for three years.
Start date: 1 October 2015.
Deadline for applications: 27 February 2015
How to apply: see further information here.