Fabienne Emmerich

Biography

LLB Dual Honours Criminology and Law (Keele), LLM, MA and PhD (Nottingham)

Fabienne graduated from Keele with an LLB Dual Honours in Criminology and Law in 2000. She also holds both an LLM in International Law and an MA in Socio-Legal and Criminological Research Methods from the University of Nottingham. She was awarded a PhD in July 2013.

Fabienne returned to the School as a member of staff in January 2011. Before joining she taught at the Universities of Nottingham and Bristol.

Fabienne was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her project “Swimming against the current: women, prison reform and resistance” (2019/2020). From August to December 2019 she will be joining the Institute of Social Pedagogy and Adult Education at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in Germany as a Visiting Researcher. She will use her time in Frankfurt to conduct fieldwork. Her project will be supported by Prof. Dr. Helga Cremer-Schäfer and Prof. Dr. Sabine Andresen. 

Research and scholarship

Fabienne's research interest is in penal sociology, in particular critical feminist approaches.

Fabienne was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in April 2018. The project “Swimming against the current: women, prison reform and resistance” (2019-2020) aims to make visible the struggle of women working to transform the prison system through the work of Helga Einsele, a German criminologist, prison governor, reformer and activist of the left. This study moves beyond exposing a woman’s voice to questions of prison reform and penal governance. It contributes to penal sociology with a critical analysis of women reformers’ resistance practices to break out of both prison as punishment and male dominated discourse of penal reform. It situates this analysis within a complex web of power relations that enable the prison to appropriate change and co-opt reformative agendas.

In her thesis she analysed the personal prison stories of former Baader-Meinhof prisoners in the period 1970-1995 by framing the lived experiences and the meanings the former prisoners attach to isolation and resistance within power and gendered dimensions of prison life and penality. Her PhD supervisors were Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit and Professor David Fraser.

In 2007-8 she collaborated in a Europe-wide interdisciplinary study, partially funded by the European Commission AGIS Programme. The project involved a survey on the conditions of detention and living conditions of long-term prisoners conducted by partners in ten European Union countries. Fabienne completed the English part of the study alongside Professor Dirk van Zyl Smit.

Fabienne is happy to supervise postgraduate research students in the areas of Gender and socio-legal/criminological approaches to criminal justice and human rights. She is particularly interested in supervising postgraduate research in Gender and the sociology of imprisonment.

Fabienne is currently co-supervising:

Sally Dowding “Squaring the Adoption Triangle: Reconciling the Competing Needs of Sibling Children” (PT) (2016-)

Felicity Adams “Transcending Cisnormarive Carceral State Logic: A Queer-

Abolitionist Challenge to Gender Responsive Criminal Sentencing and Imprisonment in England and Wales” (2019-)

Teaching

Fabienne will be on research leave from September 2019-July 2020.

She has been the module leader for Public Law 2: Administrative Law since 2011.

She was Programme Director of the LLM in Law and Society from 2015-2019.

She contributes to a wide range of modules both at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

She is happy to supervise dissertations in the areas of criminal justice and human rights.