Staff Profiles

I support Oxford Brookes' efforts to decolonise its curricula. As an academic with dyslexia and other specific learning differences, I teach with learning-different profiles in mind. In particular, I use different media in my teaching including the unique and varied collections held in Oxford's museums and archives.

Modules taught

I am the Module Leader of:

• Crime and Criminology in Context 
• Intersectionality and Crime
• Picturing the Criminal: From Mug Shot to Fine Art

I also teach on:

• Bloody Histories: Crime and Violence in the West
• Behaving Badly: Crime, Deviance, and Civilization
• The Carnivals and Pleasures of Crime
• Researching Crime

Supervision

I warmly welcome inquiries and applications from prospective PhD students interested in researching visual, material, and/or sensorial culture from the eighteenth century to the digital age as these apply to topics related to criminology, criminal justice studies, and critical criminal legal theory. 

For current funded opportunities, please see the Research Degrees website.

My first monograph, What was Criminology?, recovers a distinctive, but previously ignored discourse about the visual arts and especially Fine Arts in Cesare Lombroso’s nineteenth-century science of criminal anthropology and revises the origin story of criminology in these terms. I currently have three articles in preparation. The first, 'Is justice blind?', examines the relationship between legal and visual (especially artistic) cultures and will be published in the international critical legal theory journal Law and Critique. The second is entitled ‘Look, don’t touch: Criminological history in the digital-visual age’ and explores what criminological knowledge is lost and gained when a material ‘artefact’ is visualised as a digital image. The third is entitled ‘Seen but not heard?: From visual to aural histories of women’s criminality’ and challenges the dominant discourse of seeing and picturing in the construction of women’s criminality in the nineteenth century.

Research group membership

I'm part of the British Society of Criminology's Historical Criminology Network's steering group. Find out what we're up to via #HCNet or check out our website. 

Journal articles

• West K, 'Visual criminology and Lombroso: In memory of Nicole Rafter (1939-2016)'
  Theoretical Criminology 21 (3) (2017) pp.271-287
  ISSN: 1362-4806 eISSN: 1461-7439
  Abstract Nicole Rafter (1939–2016) formed her vast and diverse oeuvre long before the rise of visual criminology. Nevertheless, Rafter was a pioneer in this new, expanding field. Rafter’s scholarly interest in ‘the visual’ and biological theories of crime appeared in her early scholarship. Eventually, Rafter focused on the visual and Cesare Lombroso’s (1835–1909) criminal anthropology. She discovered that Lombroso was not simply the founding figure of what is today called criminology, but of visual criminology.Website 

Reviews

• West K, review of Marit Paasche and Judy Radul (eds), A Thousand Eyes: Media Technology, Law and Aesthetics, in Theoretical Criminology 18 (2) (2018) pp.248-250ISSN: 1362-4806 eISSN: 1461-7439
  Website 

Other publications

• Lageson S, Dirks D, Linneman T, Sugie N, West K, 'The Enduring Effects of Online Mug Shots'
  (2014) Website 

Journal Articles

West K, ‘Look, don’t touch: Visuality, materiality and criminological History in the digital-visual age’ (in preparation).

West K, ‘Seen but not heard?: From visual to aural herstories of women's criminality’ (in preparation).

West K, 'Is justice blind?: Law's artistic vision', Law and Critique 3 (30) (2019).

West K, 'Visual criminology and Lombroso' Theoretical Criminology 21 (3) (2017) pp.271-287.

Book

West K, What Was Criminology? From Photography to Fine Art in Lombroso's Criminal Anthropology (in preparation).