Emeritus Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology

Education

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania

M.A. University of Pennsylvania

B.A. Ohio University

Research

Mental Derangement and Criminal Responsibility

Juvenile Justice and Discretion

Capital Punishment and Race

Grants & Awards

 2001-02 Pembroke College, Cambridge University, Visiting Scholar

1999 National Endowment for the Humanities: Summer Research Stipend

1997 Recipient of the l997 Mannfred Guttmacher Award for "Distinguished contributions to the field of forensic psychiary," co-sponsored by the American Academy of Law and Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association.

1996-97 Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow

1995 Bradley R. Dewey Award for Distinguished Scholarship

1992-93 National Endowment for the Humanities: Year-long Research Fellow College of Physicians of Philadelphia: Robert Wood Johnson Fellow

1988-90 University College, Durham University, Durham, England: Leonard Slater Fellow

Publications

BOOKS:

Unconscious Crime, Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) (Named Director's Circle Book of 2003, The Johns Hopkins University Press.)

Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-doctors in the English Court. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995) (Recipient of the 1997 Mannfred Guttmacher Award for "Distinguished contributions to the field of forensic psychiatry," co-sponsored by the American Academy of Law and Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association.)

BOOK CHAPTERS:

"An inducement to morbid minds": politics and madness in the Victorian courtroom," in Markus Dubber and Lindsay Farmer (eds.) Modern Histories of Crime and Punishment. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 66-87.

"Sense and sensibility: arsenic and insanity in nineteenth-century England," in Rose Melikan (ed.) The Trial in History: Politics, Crime, and the State l600-l900 (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, in press).

"I answer as a physician: opinion as fact in pre-McNaughtan insanity trials," in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds.) Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 167-99.

JOURNAL ARTICLES AND REVIEW ESSAYS:

"The 'destabilization' of domestic psychiatry," Medical History, 2007, 51: pp. 400-402.

"The Case of the Missing Defendant: Medical Testimony in Trials of the Unconscious." The Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 2006.

"The Will of the Deviant." Harvard Law Review Forum. 2006. 119, pp. 131-138.

"Delusion's Odyssey: Charting the Course of Victorian Forensic Psyciatry." International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. 2004.

"Lesion of the will: medical resolve and criminal responsibility in the Victorian era," Law and Society Review, l999, 33, No. 2, pp. 425-460.

"Prosecuting criminal lunacy in early modern England: Did gender make a difference?" International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, l998, 21, pp. 409-4l9.

"Bewitched, bothered, and deluded: a maddening pursuit of the insanity defense," History of Psychiatry, 1997, 7, pp. 297-304.

"Delusion in the courtroom: the role of partial insanity in early forensic testimony," Medical History, 1991, 35, pp. 25-49.

"Mad-doctors in the dock: forensic psychiatry’s early claims to expert knowledge," Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1991, 13, No. 4, pp. 445-62.

BOOK REVIEWS AND BIOGRAPHIES:

Josephine McDonagh, "Child Murder and British Culture 1720-1900." (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2006, 18, pp. 373-375.

Tal Golan, "Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America." (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2004) New England Journal of Medicine, 2005, 352, pp. 520-521.

"Paul Kléber Monod, "The Murder of Mr. Grebell: Madness and Civility in an English Town." (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2003), American Historical Review, 2005, pp. 219-220.

"Biographies of Margaret Nicholson and James Hadfield," Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press).

Lawrie Reznik, "Evil or Ill, Justifying the Insanity Defense," (London: Routledge, l997), Isis, l999. 90, pp. l05-6.

Andrew Scull, Nicolas Hervey, Charlotte MacKenzie, "Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-doctoring Trade," (Princeton: Princeton University Press, l996), Medical History, l998, 42, 520-21.

Agnus McLaren, "A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream," (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Bulletin for the History of Medicine, 1995, 69, #1, pp. 144-46.

Presentations

"How the Prisoner Met the Doctor; Forensic Psychiatry and the English Courtroom, 1760-1913," Wellcome Unit, Oxford University, June 2007; International Association of Law and Mental Health, June 2007, Padua, Italy.

"Melancholia's Return: Meeting an Old Friend in Unfamiliar Surroundings," Conferences on Law and Forensic Psychiatry, The Law School, the Univeristy of Edinburgh, 2006.

"Unconsciousness and Crime: Medical Testimony and Criminal Responsibility in Historic Trials," Annual Meetings, History of Science, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2004.

" 'I Mean She Was Quite Absent': Sleepwalking and Crime in Victorian London": Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, 2003.

"Missing Persons: Consciousness and Criminality in Victorian England"; Faculty Seminar, History and Philosophy of Science Department, Cambridge University, April 2002; the Wellcome Foundation for the History of Science, London, May 2002.

"Double Consciousness and Dissociative States in the Victorian London Courtroom," Annual Meeting, American Association of Legal Historians, Princeton, November 2001.

"Paving the Road to Hell: Intentions and their Consequence in Law and Literature," Annual Meeting, International Association of Law and Mental Health, Siena, Italy, July 2000

"Arsenic and Old Scrofula: Madness and Agency in the Victorian Court," The Trial in History, Conference sponsored by the School of Law, University of Manchester, September, l999. (Also presented to the Annual Meetings of the Law and Society Association, Chicago, Illinois, May l999).

"Historical Developments in the Evolution in the English Insanity Defense," European Conference on 19th and 20th-Century Forensic Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland, 1997.

Mannfred S. Guttmacher Award Lecture, American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting, San Diego, 1997.

"The Princess and the Cherry Juice: Monomania, Delusion, and Testamentary Capacity," The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, 1997.

"Lesion of the Will: Diagnosing Criminal Responsibility in Victorian England," Legal History Forum, Yale Law School, New Haven, 1996.

"Syndrome as Metaphor: Translating Domestic Violence into a Medico-Legal Defense," Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology, 1992.

"I Answer as a Physician: The Assertion of Opinion Over Fact in Pre-McNaughtan Insanity Trials," 150th Anniversary of the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, April 1992.

"Delusion in the Courtroom: Partial Insanity and the Emergence of Forensic Psychiatry," Cornell University, School of Medicine, New York City, 1990.