Rachel Bennett
University of Warwick
Dr Rachel Bennett is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, at the University of Warwick. Her research strand is focused upon medical care in English and Irish women’s prisons and examines provisions for maternity care and childbirth in the prison, the distinct responses of women to the prison experience and the importance of women’s reform groups and charitable organisations in identifying and advocating for female prisoner health needs. Her broader research interests include several facets of crime and punishment in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, the intersections between medical advancement and the criminal justice system, and the pre- and post-mortem treatment of the criminal body.
Fiachra Byrne
University College Dublin
Dr Fiachra Byrne is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, at University College Dublin. His current research project is on the mental health of juvenile prisoners in England and Ireland from 1850 to 2000. This comparative study examines the penal practices, legal frameworks, and professional and public discourses relating to the management of juvenile prisoners’ mental health. He completed his PhD at UCD, in 2011, on psychiatry and mental illness in Ireland during the twentieth century. It examined compelling patient narratives of mental illness, investigating how notions of the self, autonomy and mental pathology were constructed through processes of medical, patient and familial exchange.
Margaret Charleroy
University of Warwick
Dr Margaret Charleroy trained as an historian of medicine and received her PhD from the University of Minnesota. As a Research Fellow on the prisons project at the University of Warwick, she examines the management of prisoners’ health, disease, and chronic illness in institutions shaped by imperatives to punish, control, and rehabilitate as well as efforts to improve conditions and prisoners’ well-being.
Fíona Ní Chinnéide
The Irish Penal Reform Trust
Fíona Ní Chinnéide is Acting Executive Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. She has led the organisation’s external communications and implementation of its campaigns programme since March 2009, when she joined as Campaigns and Communications Officer. Fíona has extensive experience working in the area of advocacy, campaigns and communications within the non-profit sector in Ireland and Europe. An undergraduate and graduate student of Trinity College Dublin, Fíona holds an M.Phil. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Political Communications at Dublin City University, which centred on media, public opinion and policy change.
Catherine Cox
University College Dublin
Associate Professor Catherine Cox is one of the PIs on the prison project and is Director of the UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at University College Dublin. With Hilary Marland, she is researching the project strand on mental health in prisons, 1850–2000. Her publications include Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820-1900 (2012); with Hilary Marland, Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013); with Susannah Riordan, Adolescence in Modern Irish History (2015). She is co-editor of Irish Economic and Social History.
Anita Dockley
The Howard League
Anita Dockley is Research Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform (UK). She is responsible for developing the charity’s research capacity, forging links with academics and universities, funders and partner organisations. Her own research interests include suicide and self-harm in prisons, women in prison and order and control in the prison environment.
Holly Dunbar
University College Dublin
Dr Holly Dunbar is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, at University College Dublin. Her research project is on prisoner health and after-care. Her work examines the evolving relationship between philanthropic organisations and the state in medical provision and health promotion among released prisoners. Prior to moving to UCD, she completed her thesis on gender and the Irish nationalist daily newspapers, c.1912 to 1923, at the University of Southampton.
Kimmett Edgar
The Prison Reform Trust
Dr Kimmett Edgar is Head of Research at the Prison Reform Trust (UK), having previously been Senior Research Officer at the Oxford Centre for Criminological Research. His major work, Prison Violence: The Dynamics of Conflict, Fear and Power, explored the roots of prison violence in conflicts among prisoners. At the Prison Reform Trust, his work on mental health includes Troubled Inside: The Mental Health Needs of Men in Prison, Too Little, Too Late: An Independent Review of Unmet Mental Health Needs in Prison, and “Recognising mental health – balancing risk and care” (2010). He is a member of the Northern Ireland Ministerial Forum on Safer Custody and Quaker Representative to the UN Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice.
Gerry McFlynn
Irish Council for Prisoners Overseas
Father Gerry McFlynn manages the London office of the Irish Council for Prisoners’ Overseas. The Irish Council for Prisoners’ Overseas was established by the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in 1985 and works on behalf of Irish prisoners overseas to provide information and support to these prisoners and their families.
Hilary Marland
University of Warwick
Professor Hilary Marland is one of the PIs on the prison project and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. With Catherine Cox she is researching the project strand on mental health in prisons, 1850–2000. Her research and publications have focused on the history of psychiatry, including Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain (2004) and the relationship between migration and mental illness, a joint project with Catherine Cox, resulting in Migration, Health, and Ethnicity in the Modern World (2013). Her most recent book was Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920 (2013). Aside from prison medicine, she is currently working on medicine in the modern household.
Jane Mulcahy
Cork Alliance Centre
Jane Mulcahy is a research consultant and PhD candidate in law at University College Cork. Her research is entitled “Connected Corrections and Corrected Connections: Post-release Supervision of Long Sentence Male Prisoners” and explores the practices, actions and resources in the community that enhance their reintegration prospects. Jane holds an Irish Research Council funded employment scholarship and is co-funded by the Probation Service. Her employment partner is the Cork Alliance Centre, a desistance project in Cork city. As an independent research consultant Jane wrote “The Practice of Pre-trial detention in Ireland (2016)” for the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT) as part of an EU Commission funded project facilitated by Fair Trials International.
William Murphy
Dublin City University
Dr William Murphy is a lecturer in the School of History and Geography, Dublin City University. He is the author of Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921 (2014), which is now available in paperback, and the chapters on prisons in the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (2017). As a member of the prisons project team, he is currently working on the pressures brought to bear on prison systems by issues relating to political prisoners’ health, and the effect this had on public perceptions of the prison.
Janet Weston
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Dr Janet Weston is a Research Fellow on the Wellcome Trust project, ‘Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000’, based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is carrying out research on the history of HIV/AIDS in prisons. Janet completed her PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2015, on medical approaches to sexual offenders. Her research interests encompass histories of medicine and psychiatry, sexuality and gender, law, and criminology, crime, and punishment. She is also involved in the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and mentors young people with the educational charity Arts Emergency.
Victoria Williams
Food Matters
Victoria Williams is co-founder and Director at Food Matters. Victoria’s expertise centres on food poverty and food access issues, in particular the effect of national policies on local food initiatives. Victoria is currently working on “Food Matters Inside & Out”. It supports prison reform by improving the health and wellbeing of prisoners by addressing their diets through the creation of a prison-wide healthy eating environment. Victoria is Chair of the Board of Directors, Brighton and Hove Food Partnership and a trustee at Sustain: the Alliance for Better Food and Farming.
Exploring the history of prisoner health 