New Directions in Penal History

Session Submission Type: Complete Thematic Panel

Abstract

This panel assembles three papers that extend and develop penal history. The first locates questions of identification, detection, and subjectivity that are at criminology's core in texts from the early republic. The second confronts the neat divisions between accounts of the motivations for penal reform and the lived practices of penal administration. The third considers whether the methodological tools available for thinking historically about crime, criminal justice, and penality demand a "penal historiography." Together, the three papers push for an interdisciplinary perspective on the study of penal history.

Sub Unit

• Area IX. Comparative & Historical Perspectives / 57. Historical Comparisons of Crime & Justice

Individual Presentations

• The Great Perfection: Death Sermons, Criminology, and the Imagined Republic in the Postrevolutionary United States - Chase Burton, University of California, Berkeley

• Eschewing Sentimentality?: The Role of Anxiety, Interpersonal Conflict, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Penal Reform - Ashley Rubin, University of Toronto

• From Penal History to Penal Historiography - Johann Koehler, University of California, Berkeley

Chair

• Johann Koehler, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant

• Heather Schoenfeld, Northwestern University