Kate West is a Lecturer in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London.

Kate read Law at the University of Edinburgh (First Class, McClintock Prize for best overall performance in selected Honours modules) before completing her ESRC-funded MSc in Criminology (Distinction, Routledge Criminology Prize for best degree performance) and ESRC-funded DPhil in Criminology at the University of Oxford.

Her DPhil critically analysed how Cesare Lombroso’s biological anthropology moved beyond photographic evidentiality and into the visual arts as a site of knowledge production particularly within coloniality.

Kate is a historian of criminology (nineteenth century bioanthropology, biopsychology, psychiatry and forensics) researching the knowledge and subject production of ‘criminality’, critically understood, and with a particular focus on visual culture. Her research is informed by theoretical perspectives from critical art history, visual culture studies and postcolonial studies.

Her first book, The Death of Painting? Criminology’s Unlikely Art History (under contract with McGill–Queen’s University Press) is a revisionist art history of criminology and shows how Lombroso was using art historical methods in relation to painting and sculpture and in such a way that his criminology might be considered a form of art history itself. In turn the book unsettles distinctions between the humanities and sciences at the turn of the century.

Her current research has two interrelated strands relating to Empire’s bodily production of criminality. The first relates to broad questions about how coloniality and other axes of power within criminology and criminal justice make body parts, from the genitals to the hand, meaningful within visual culture.

The second strand is anatomical, and she is Principal Investigator on the IoPPN-funded research project entitled 'Recurating the Pathological Museum: An Anatomy of Ethical Spectatorship'. The project develops a feminist and postcolonial theoretical and disability studies-informed response to the acquisition, display, and use of human body parts, understood within the broader context of the production and consumption of knowledge about otherness.

Research interests

• Critical (feminist and/or postcolonial) histories of criminology and criminal justice
• Critical art history and visual culture studies
• Knowledge and subject production relating to the body and embodiment
• Resistance and abolition

Expertise and public engagement

Kate is a first-generation, disabled academic and subject expert with a strong commitment to public engagement.

She delivered the University of Oxford’s Annual Public Lecture on how the neurotypical university structurally excludes neurodivergent students and academics, has been interviewed by the New Statesman on the impact of pandemic responses on neurodivergent learners, and has contributed to national radio discussions on the history of criminal justice.