Kate completed her PhD in 2019 winning a studentship at the University of Leicester, it’s monograph – Sound, Order and Survival in Prison – won the British Society of Criminology Annual Book prize in 2024.
She then won the Mellon-Kings Research Fellowship in Punishment and remained at King’s College, University of Cambridge until 2025.
Passionate about sharing criminological ideas accessibly, Kate recently featured in an episode of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 and has curated sensorycriminology.com since 2019, a blog designed to accompany the co-edited collection Sensory Penalities (2019) Interested in working at the meeting places of criminology and other fields and disciplines she has enduring interests in sensory methods, sociology of music and how these can deepen our understanding of criminological issues. The co-edited volume Sound and Detention, created with colleagues in musicology and sound studies explores critical listening at the junctions of criminal justice, sound and music. The book is accompanied by an audio archive which aims to evolve the way we engage with media as well as reconfiguring the ‘academic’ audience. The co-edited Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Criminology similarly seeks to expand the perimeters of criminology by foregrounding how we taste, smell, feel, and sense the criminological.
In 2026 Kate was awarded a three-year honorary fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.
Recent Publications:
Herrity, K., Warr, J. (Forthcoming) ‘More than bells and Whistles? Prisons and the Sensory’ in Bennett, J., Gooch, K., Jewkes, Y. (eds) (3rd edition) The Handbook on Prisons, London: Routledge
Herrity, K. (2026) “Ghosts in the machine? Sound, Structure and Agency” and “Reading closely: Response to Hanneke Stuit” in Dilemma, R., Schneider, L., Rebughini, R. (eds). “Agency Beyond Confinement: Rethinking the Relationship Between Agency and Structure in the Contemporary World” London: Routledge
Herrity, K, Sharma, K., Umamaheswar, J., Warr, J.J. (2026) Sensory Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination in Herrity, K, Sharma, K., Umamaheswar, J., Warr, J.J. (eds) International Handbook of Sensory Criminology. London: Routledge.
Herrity, K. (2026) Sensing Security, Sensing Safety Advancing Corrections, Journal for the International Corrections and Prisons Association (ICPA), Issue 20, 2026.
Herrity, K., Wiggan, J. (2025) “Emotional overdubbing: listening passports to sonic agency in the Fens unit, HMP Whitemoor ” in Cathcart-Froden, L., Herrity, K., Mangaoang, A. (eds) Sound and Detention: Critical listening, sonic citizenship and social justice. London: Bloomsbury.
Herrity, K. (2024) Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The rhythms and routines of HMP Midtown. Bristol University Press
Keywords: Sensory Criminology, Prisons Ethnography, Sound, violence, Trauma, musicking
Punishment, Citizenship and Communities
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