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Biography
Professor Philippa Tomczak holds a £1.1m UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and £1.3m ERC Starting Grant. She directs the Prisons, Health and Societies Research Group and undertook research and impact work with the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman from 2019-2022. Philippa's publications can be viewed here. ORCID identifier: 0000-0002-2347-2479.
Her expertise is in punishment, specifically: prison suicide, investigating deaths in criminal justice detention, regulating criminal justice detention, the penal voluntary sector, charitable involvement in (criminal) justice, actor-network theory and document analysis.
Philippa particularly welcomes inquiries from prospective postdoctoral researchers, PhD students, academics and voluntary organisations seeking to analyse the following areas: death in criminal justice detention; prisoner death investigations; the Prison and Probation Ombudsman; Coroner Prevention of Future Death reports relating to state detention; prisoner safeguarding; intersections between imprisonment, mental health detention and immigration detention; prison(er) health and healthcare; prison safety.
Between 2015 and 2018 Philippa was a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (scheme success rate: 14%) and British Academy Rising Star at the University of Sheffield Centre for Criminological Research. She has a PhD in Criminology from the University of Manchester School of Law, and a BA, MA and MSc from the University of Oxford. She originally trained as a Geographer. She sits on the British Journal of Criminology and Howard Journal of Crime and Justice Editorial Boards.
Philippa published the first monograph on 'The Penal Voluntary Sector', which won the 2017 British Society of Criminology Book Prize. For Prof M Bosworth (Oxford), it "develops a fresh approach to penal power that should reorient the field of study". Prof S Maruna (Manchester) noted: "Tomczak's sophisticated, empirical exploration of the voluntary sector's involvement in that most involuntary of sectors, the UK's penal system, simply could not be more timely or more badly needed. It fills an enormous gap in the criminological literature while opening up dozens of new avenues for new research. A real path-breaker".
Philippa's second monograph 'Prison suicide: what happens afterwards?' provides the first detailed account of the investigations that follow prison suicides, using the case study of England and Wales. Professor P Leach (Middlesex) recognised that "this excellent study shows the wider impact of self-inflicted deaths in prison and deserves to be widely read''.
She has published articles in leading journals including the British Journal of Criminology and Theoretical Criminology and her work has been cited by scholars based globally, including Australia, Canada, the USA, Finland and New Zealand. She has been invited to peer review articles for journals including: British Journal of Social Work; Theoretical Criminology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology and International Review of Victimology. During 2017 and 2018, Philippa organised a series of international conferences with high profile speakers, on topics including 'Death in Punishment', the 'Voluntary Sector in Criminal Justice' and 'Emerging Criminal Justice Voluntary Sector Scholarship'. Philippa was shortlisted for the Political Studies Association's Total Exposure programme in 2017 and pitched a programme: 'Suicides in prison: Should we care?' to media experts.
Philippa has extensive experience of mentoring early career scholars and was commended as a University of Sheffield dedicated outstanding thesis mentor in November 2017. She has taught across undergraduate Criminology modules at the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, having a range of lecturing and seminar-taking experience. She has examined a PhD thesis at the University of Portsmouth Institute of Criminal Justice Studies and supervised Masters' level dissertations.
Qualifications
- PhD Criminology, the University of Manchester (funded by a School of Law Scholarship)
- MSc Criminology and Criminal Justice, the University of Oxford (Linacre College)
- BA/MA Geography, the University of Oxford (Hertford College).
Recent Publications