Dr Emily Rose Hay (she/her)

I am a historian of crime and criminal justice working with Professor Gwen Robinson on the Leverhulme Trust project 'Probation’s Evolving Frontline: An oral history of probation paraprofessionals'.

I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2023, co-supervised across social history and criminology by Professors Louise Jackson and Richard Sparks. My doctoral research explored representations of child homicide in the British press in the late twentieth century, and investigated how these were shaped and inflected by historical, spatial and personal circumstances. I am currently working on publishing sections of my thesis.

Related to this, I co-founded and convened the Emotionally Demanding Histories Group in 2019 to address and explore researcher experiences of doing emotionally sensitive work. I have also acted as a committee member for the Challenging Research Network.

Throughout my PhD, I worked as an Associate Lecturer in Criminology for the Open University and taught history and criminology modules at the University of Edinburgh, and I have been awarded my Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. Between 2016 and 2018, I was the Research Assistant for the Leverhulme-funded Penal History Project at Queen Mary University of London, researching political prisoners throughout the Northern Irish conflict.