Dominique Moran

Dominique Moran studied Geography at Oxford, graduating in 1995 with a First Class BA(Hons) and the Gibbs Prize, and in 2000 with a D.Phil (thesis title: Russia's Emerging Margins - the Transition in the north of Perm oblast). Her PhD work was amongst the first to explore post-socialist transformation in the geographically marginal areas of the Russian near-North. She carried out fieldwork in former 'special settlements', part of the Stalinist Gulag, and in communities proximate to contemporary prison colonies.

She then moved to a Research Fellowship at Warwick Business School (2000-01) working on social exclusion and organisational change in the UK funded by the (then) UK Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) and the Social Exclusion Unit, before joining the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham where she was Lecturer in Rural Poverty and Development until 2004. At IDD she carried out policy-oriented research into HIV/AIDS, governance reform and service delivery, primarily for the UK Department for International Development, and worked closely with DfID Governance Advisors in country offices.

Dominique joined the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2004 as a Lecturer. She held a Visiting Fellowship at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, in 2011, and was promoted to Chair in 2018. She is Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the European Society of Criminology, and a member of the Global Prisons Research Network, a multi-disciplinary network for scholars worldwide researching prisons and other institutions of confinement – from the everyday life of specific institutions, to the wider political impact of penal policy changes.

BA(Hons) Class I in Geography 1995 (Oxford)

DPhil in Geography 2001 (Oxford)

Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 2006 (Birmingham)

Dominique Moran’s research and teaching is in the sub-discipline of carceral geography, a geographical perspective on incarceration. Her research in the UK, Russia and Scandinavia, supported by the ESRC, has contributed to her transdisciplinary work, informed by and extending theoretical developments in geography, criminology and prison sociology, but also interfacing with contemporary debates over hyperincarceration, recidivism and the advance of the punitive state.

Dominique was Founding Chair of the Carceral Geography Working Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, 2017-2020, amd remains a member of the CGWG Committee.

She is author of 'Carceral Geography: Spaces and Practices of Incarceration' (2015) and an editor of Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past (2015), ‘Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention’ (2013), ‘Carceral Spatiality: Dialogues between Geography and Criminology’ (2017) 'The Palgrave Handbook of Prison and the Family' (2019) and the forthcoming The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design. She publishes in leading journals including Progress in Human Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers and Theoretical Criminology.

Dominique's current and previous research activities have been supported as follows:

• 2021-24 Australian Research Council, Social Infrastructure in a Society of Captives AUS$259k, CI
• 2020-23 Economic and Social Research Council, The Persistence of the Victorian Prison, £804k, PI
• 2020-22 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Correctional staff in Canada: Understanding the armed forces to civilian transition within prison spaces in Canadian provinces CAN$55k, CI
• 2020-2023 Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Team Grant: Mental Wellness in Public Safety Team Grant: A Longitudinal Study of Correctional Services Canada Correctional Officers’ Mental Health and Well-being: The Role of Prison Work and Prisons in Shaping Correctional Staff Health and Self over Time CAN$1.5m, CI
• 2016-18 ESRC, Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) £15,665 (PI), Therapeutic Environments for Youth Custody, PI
• 2015 ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Secondment Grant for work with the Northern Ireland Reducing Offending Directorate, and Northern Ireland Prison Service (NIPS) £19,924, PI
• 2014-15 ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Urgency Grant for work with the Northern Ireland Reducing Offending Directorate, and Northern Ireland Prison Service (NIPS) £2,180, PI
• 2014-2017 ESRC 'Fear-suffused environments’ or potential to rehabilitate? Prison architecture, design and technology and the lived experience of carceral spaces £728,000, CI
• "Milieux de mémoire in Eastern Europe", 196,660 PLN (c£39k), CI
• 2012-2016 ESRC 'Breaking the Cycle: Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK' £361,000, PI
• 2012-2015 ESRC Seminar Series 'Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigrant Detention' £17,990, CI
• 2011 Visiting Fellowship, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki 'Welfare, Gender and Agency: Women's Imprisonment in Russia' €4,500
• 2006-2010 ESRC 'Women in the Russian Penal System: The role of distance in the theory and practice of imprisonment in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia' £303,552, CI
• 2009-2010 Commission of the European Communities (Marie Curie) 'Changing attitudes towards living natural resources in the Russian/Soviet Empire and the exchange of knowledge with Europe: an environmental history perspective'. €127,158, CI
• 2009 Head of School and Head of College's Award for Excellence in Supporting Student Learning £1000
• 2006-2008 British Academy 'The Cultural Landscape as a Heritage Feature: A comparative study of the UK and Russia' £47,122, PI
• 2004-2005 UK Department for International Development 'Non-State Delivery of Services' £81,632, CI
• 2004 UK Department for International Development 'Governance Reform' £54,138, CI
• 2002 British Academy 'The Kremlin Stars and Soviet Ideology' £2,032, PI
• 1996-2000 ESRC Postgraduate Studentship, University of Oxford
• 1996-2000 Mortimer May Senior Scholarship, Hertford College, University of Oxford