Dr. Kate West is Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at King’s College London. She read Law at the University of Edinburgh before completing her ESRC-funded MSc and DPhil in Criminology at the University of Oxford, winning numerous academic prizes including best MSc performance at Oxford. Kate is a historian of nineteenth-century criminology, researching the subject production of ‘criminality’ , critically understood, with a focus on visual culture.
Her first book, The Death of Painting? Criminology’s Unlikely Art History (under contract with McGill–Queen’s University Press), shows how the nineteenth century criminologist Lombroso used art historical epistemes and methods in such a way and extent that challenges distinctions between the humanities and natural sciences at the turn of the century as well as the implicit assumptions about modernity that underlie them.
Her current research explores how the coloniality and attendant axes of power in criminology and criminal justice shape the body as ‘criminal’ within visual culture. She is Principal Investigator of ‘Recurating the Pathology Museum: An Anatomy of Ethical Spectatorship’, which draws on carceral theory and develops a feminist, postcolonial, and disability studies-informed approach to the display and use of human remains relating to knowledge production within criminology and criminal justice.
Kate is a first-generation, disabled academic and subject expert with a strong commitment to public engagement. She delivered the University of Oxford’s Annual Disability Lecture to a sell-out 1,000 person audience on how the neurotypical university structurally excludes neurodivergent students and academics, has been interviewed by the New Statesman on the impact of pandemic responses on neurodivergent students, and has contributed to national broadcast media including the BBC on the history of criminal justice.