Professor Dominique Moran DPhil

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

DPhil in Geography 2001 (Oxford)

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

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.

Year 3 Carceral Geographies

Dominique’s teaching is research-led, student-centred and has been recognised as high quality via the 2009 Head of School’s and Head of College’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching and Supporting Student Learning, GEES and LES, University of Birmingham, and the University of Birmingham Higher Education Futures Institute (HEFi) Award for Research Intensive Learning and Teaching, 2018. She was nominated by students for an Outstanding Teaching Award for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences in 2019, and for a University Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision in 2012 and 2017.

Dominique holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCert), Birmingham 2006 and has published the following peer-reviewed teaching publications:

• Moran, D & Round, J (2010) A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma: Teaching post-socialist transformation to UK students in Moscow, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 34(2) 265-282 Available for download
• Moran, D (2009) Teaching post-socialism, twenty years on, Planet (22) 39-41 Available for download

Carceral Geography

PhD title

Russia's Emerging Margins - the Transition in the north of Perm oblast'

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 Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design' (2022) 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 

Dominique has given invited talks at the Universities of Melbourne, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Glasgow, Aberystwyth, Exeter, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Amsterdam, and Toronto. She has also spoken at the Tower of London (for Historic Royal Palaces), and at the Howard League for Penal Reform.

She has co-organised numerous series' of sessions on carceral geography at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual conferences in Boston (2017), San Francisco (2016), Chicago (2015), Tampa (2014), Los Angeles (2013), Seattle (2011) and Washington DC (2010); at the RGS-IBG in 2012, 2014, and 2019, and also at the Nordic Geographers Conference, and the European Society of Criminology.  She chaired the first 1st and 2nd International Conferences for Carceral Geography at the University of Birmingham in 2016 and 2017, and gave a keynote address at the 3rd, at the University of Liverpool in 2018.

Dominique sits on the Advisory Board for Incarceration: An international journal of imprisonment, detention and coercive confinement and reviews for prominent Geography journals including Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Environment & Planning: D; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, leading Area Studies journals including Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics; Sociology journals including International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, and leading criminology journals such as Theoretical Criminology.

Dominique gave the first seminar in an online series organised by the Evidence and Partnerships Hub, part of the Data Analytical Services Directorate at the Ministry of Justice. She addressed over 85 MoJ analysts who collate research evidence to inform policy.

Dominque also presented as part of a seminar organised by the Insights Group, part of the Strategy, Planning & Performance Directorate at Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. This sell-out event, with over 230 virtual attendees across the prison estate of England and Wales, was focused on prison environments. In both talks, Dominique drew on her recent work with Phil Jones, Amy Porter and former GEES colleague Jacob Jordaan (now U.Utrecht), which demonstrates a link between greenspace and wellbeing in prison.