Dr Louise Kennefick

Louise researches across the fields of criminal law theory, criminal justice and criminology.

She is particularly curious about how and why we blame each other, and the impact of condemnation on the person and the community. Her work in the area of community supervision and desistance involves constructing grounded theoretical frameworks by mining the lived experiences of core stakeholders within the supervision field through the application of quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

She is the recipient of a Glasgow Law Fellowship (2020), SLS Research Activities Award (2018), and an IRC ‘New Ideas’ Award (2012) for her work on criminal responsibility and excuse, in addition to funding from the European COST Network and the Department of Justice and Equality (Ireland) for her research in the area of offender supervision.

Louise is Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law at The University of Glasgow. She qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales before completing her doctoral thesis at University College Cork in 2011, and spending a decade at Maynooth University where she held the roles of lecturer and associate professor.

Recent publications:

• L Kennefick, D Healy and N Wade, “Helping, hurting, holding and hands off’: preliminary findings from an oral history of probation client experiences of supervision in Ireland” (2022) 19 Irish Probation Journal 38
• L Kennefick, D Healy and N Wade, “Understanding Probation Supervision in Ireland: What Can We Learn From An Historical Approach? (2021) 22 Probation Quarterly 8
• L Kennefick and D Healy, “The Past in the Present: A Historical Perspective on Probation Work at the Intersection between the Penal Voluntary and Criminal Justice Sectors” in Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland: Perspectives from the Periphery (Emerald Publishing, 2022)