Dr Kate West

LLB (Hons) (Edin) MSc DPhil (Oxon)

Senior Lecturer in Criminology

School of Law and Social Sciences

Kate West

Role

Dr Kate West is Senior Lecturer in Criminology. Before joining Oxford Brookes, she taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Reading. She completed her research council-funded DPhil (PhD) and MSc (Distinction and Routledge Prize for best degree performance) at the University of Oxford and earned her LLB (First Class and McClintock Prize for best modular performances) at the University of Edinburgh.

Teaching and supervision

Research

Kate’s research focuses on visual culture and biological theories of crime, especially the work of Cesare Lombroso, from a postcolonial perspective. Her doctoral research critically examined the role of modern Western-European visual art and imperial and colonial ethnological drawings, paintings, and prints in Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology. She conducted this research at institutions such as the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin and the Museum of Natural History in Le Havre. She also undertook English-language translations of key Italian and French primary sources, having trained in academic Italian at the University of Oxford’s Language Centre.

She is finalising the manuscript for her first book, The Death of Painting? (under contract with McGill-Queens University Press). The book challenges the dominant view that photography was the primary visual medium of Lombroso’s criminal anthropology as a scientific practice, revealing instead how the visual arts shaped it as a cultural one. She is concurrently working on a second book exploring the role of the human body—its parts and visual representation—in Lombroso’s criminal anthropology as ‘colonial territories of criminality’ across Europe and its empires. She has a number of articles in review analysing the colonial construction of Lombroso’s ‘criminal woman’ from a feminist postcolonial perspective and the ethics of this mythical figure’s representation both then and now.

Kate has published in international peer-reviewed journals and presented her research at academic, professional, and public forums worldwide. Most recently, she was invited to discuss the ethics of exhibiting criminal portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her research has been featured in local and national broadcast media, including BBC Radio 3. In 2021, she was shortlisted for Channel 5’s New Faces’ New Voices project. She is represented Lexington Literary for commercial and trade writing.

Groups

Publications

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Further details

Kate, who is openly autistic, presented the University of Oxford’s Annual Disability Lecture to a sell-out 1000-capacity audience in 2020 and has been interviewed about her disability activism for national news media including The New Statesman.