Dr Louise Brangan

Louise is a sociologist of punishment, and her research focuses on the political and cultural dynamics of incarceration.

She is the author of “The Politics of Punishment”, which is a comparative study of penal politics and imprisonment in Ireland and Scotland at the end of the twentieth century. She has an edited volume on the “Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland” (with Deirdre Healy and Lynsey Black).

She has been the recipient of the Brian Williams Best Article Prize (2020), Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize (2021) and of a Fulbright scholarship (2015). In 2023, Louise was named as one of the BBC/AHRC’s New Generation Thinkers, who are ‘ten of the UK’s most promising arts and humanities early career researchers’.

In 2021 she is beginning a 3-year ESRC funded study, “Mass Decarceration: A critical social history”. This focuses on Ireland’s system of Magdalene Laundries and Mother Baby Homes, exploring how these institutions, once used on a mass scale, came to an end.

Recent publications
Books
Brangan, L. (2021) The Politics of Punishment : a comparative study of imprisonment and political culture, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Black, L., Brangan, L. and Healy, D. (2022) Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland: Perspectives from a periphery, Emerald.

Articles
Brangan, L., 2021. Pastoral penality in 1970s Ireland: Addressing the pains of imprisonment. Theoretical criminology, 25(1), pp.44–65.
Brangan, L., 2020. Exceptional states: The political geography of comparative penology. Punishment & society, 22(5), pp.596–616.
Brangan, L., 2019. Civilizing Imprisonment: The Limits of Scottish Penal Exceptionalism. British journal of criminology, 59(4), pp.780–799.