I am a first-year PhD student in criminology at the University of Glasgow. My PhD is provisionally titled ‘”Pop-up prisons”, carceral change, and penal expansion(ism)’ and is fully funded by an ESRC Doctoral Scholarship through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences (SGSSS). I am also a fellow of the Stuart Hall Foundation and a member of its peer network, as well as a member of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Before beginning my PhD, I was a researcher at the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice (based at the University of Strathclyde), working across a number of projects relating to children in conflict with the law. For several years, I was based in London as Research and Policy Officer at StopWatch UK, a criminal justice charity committed to turning a spotlight on stop and search, police abuse of power, and the over-policing of racialised and marginalised communities. My research work at StopWatch received national media attention and has been widely cited, including by the House of Commons Library. As part of this role, I regularly responded to requests for comment from media outlets, created accessible resources on police powers, and represented the organisation at public events in the UK and internationally (e.g., on panels, roundtables, and in Parliament) as well as in an online capacity (e.g., as a podcast guest). Prior to joining StopWatch, I spent six months in academic publishing, working as an assistant editor at Oxford University Press.
On top of my PhD studies, I am also a freelance researcher and writer. Over the past couple of years, I’ve worked on a range of criminal justice topics, including women’s problem-solving courts (ongoing project), stop and search and other police powers, civil-criminal hybrid orders (in particular, serious violence reduction orders and knife crime prevention orders), and deaths in custody. In the near future, I’m hoping to branch out from writing exclusively about criminal justice and to explore other subjects and ideas.
My academic background is in law, languages, and social science: I have an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Oxford (2021, Distinction) and an LLB (Hons) Law and French from the University of Edinburgh (2019, First Class). I was awarded the St Cross Divisional Scholarship in the Social Sciences at Oxford, and was a recipient of the McClintock Prize in Criminology and the Joelle Godard Prize while at Edinburgh.
I love cooking, reading, hiking, long-distance running, cycling, crochet, the cinema, and public transport. 🤠
My academic email address is: h.bird.2@research.gla.ac.uk
Holly Bird 