Dr Stephanie Emma Brown
Stephanie is an Economic and Social Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Criminology. She is a member of the Violence Research Centre and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Stephanie is a historian of crime and criminal justice interested the prosecution of violent crime from 1350 to 1900. Her research interests include legal and social conceptions of violence, the socio-economic backgrounds of criminals and victims, and the construction of criminality. Her work tackles the question of how prosecution is shaped by social ideas about violence, gender, ethnicity, and class.
The history of crime and criminal justice (1350-1900).
The 'crisis' of the fourteenth century (Famine, Black Death, Peasants Revolt)
Socio-legal history
English and Welsh history
I am able to supervise Outline Papers 2, 3, 4, and 7.
I co-convene the 'History of Violence' option on the Criminology MPhil.
SELECTED INVITED PAPERS
June 2022 Centre for English Legal History Seminar, Cambridge | Identity and the prosecution of homicide in fourteenth-century Yorkshire
May 2022 Coverture conference, University of Florida | Coverture and crime in late medieval England
March 2022 Early Modern British and Irish History Seminar, Cambridge | Memory, narratives, and remembering
May 2021 Medieval Economic and Social History Seminar, Cambridge | Violence in the vill: Manorial amercements for bloodshed in fourteenth-century Yorkshire
March 2021 Late Medieval Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London | Making a medieval murderer: Identity and prosecution in fourteenth-century Yorkshire
SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS
Sept 2022 Manorial Documents Conference | Manorial amercements in fourteenth-century Yorkshire
June 2022 British Society of Criminology | A matter of life and death: mercy and murder, South Wales 1850-1900
April 2022 Economic History Society Conference | Let the punishment fit the man: manorial amercements for bloodshed in 14th-century Yorkshire
Sept 2021 ‘Race’, law, and group identity in medieval Europe, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń | ‘Non-English’ suspects and victims of homicide in late medieval Yorkshire
July 2021 International Medieval Congress, Leeds | 'A golden age of lawlessness': Crime in the Court Rolls of 14th-Century Yorkshire
March 2021 Women’s History Network, International Women’s Day Conference | Female-perpetrated homicide in late medieval Yorkshire
July 2019 International Medieval Congress, Leeds | Law and Disorder in the Black Death
Sept 2018 British Crime Historians Symposium, Edgehill | Judicial activity during the Black Death
Aug 2017 Tradition and Innovation, CEU, Budapest | 'Legitimate Rape': A re-evaluation of Raptus legislation
Member of The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP)
Founder of the Legal and Social History Workshop
Early Career Member of the Royal Historical Society
Member of the Economic History Society and the Social History Society
Committee Member for Crime and Punishment Network
Editor of Doing History in Public (2019-2020) and of the Social History Society's Community Exchange
Member of the London Society for Medieval Studies
Coordinator of History for Schools, 2020-21
Project Lead for Open History, 2020-21
Contact
Tags & Themes
CAMPOP Room 3.4, Faculty of History, West Road, University of Cambridge
Key publications
‘“Completely innocent or wholly culpable”: Judicial outcomes of women tried for homicide in pre-modern England’, in I. Masson and N. Booth eds. The Routledge Handbook of Women's Experiences of Criminal Justice (Routledge, 2022).
‘The only consolation is that the criminal is not a Welshman: The foreign-born men hanged in Wales, 1840-1900’, in P. Low, H. Rutherford, C. Sandford-Couch, eds. Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual (Routledge, 2021).