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, and is also 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.

Dominique held a Visiting Fellowship at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki, in 2011.

Visit Dominique’s own carceral geography websites at www.carceralgeography.com; www.prisonspaces.com, and www.prisonvisitsandrecidivism.com

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

Visiting Researchers in the Carceral Geography Lab

• Irene Marti - PhD candidate at the University of Neuchatel, and research assistant at the University of Bern, Switzerland, spent six months at GEES. Her project, Living the prison: An ethnographic study of indefinite incarceration in Switzerland, was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, who also funded her overseas institutional visit to Birmingham.
• Virve Repo - PhD candidate at the University of Turku, Finland, spent 2 months at GEES working on her PhD entitled "Confined to Space. Limited Spaces in Everyday Life". 
• Zhang Bo - academic researcher at the National Police University for Criminal Justice in China, visited for six months with funding from the China Scholarship Council, working on in the potential for prison architecture to have a positive effect on the work of prison staff and the rehabilitation of prisoners, and the ways in which penal philosophy is translated into prison design and architecture.

Current Doctoral Researchers

• Ellie Slee (ESRC studentship) The role of prison architecture and aesthetics in the relationship between prisons and host communities (with Yvonne Jewkes - U. Leicester, Peter Kraftl and Sophie Hadfield Hill)
• Catherine Oliver (with Pat Noxolo)
• Will Thurbin (with Peter Kraftl)

PhD title

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

Dominique's interdisciplinary research in carceral geography has defined a new field, engaging with criminology, legal studies, prison sociology and psychology to explore carceral practices in a variety of contexts including the UK, Finland, Norway, Denmark and the Russian Federation.

Her work explores the experience of carceral spaces and their design, and the effects of the built environment on prisoners' wellbeing. She is currently working to understand the effects of nature contact, and to explore the experience of ex-military personnel working within the prison service.

Nature contact and wellbeing in incarceration 

In a series of connected projects, Dominique has explored the effects of the prison built environment - especially different forms of nature contact - on the wellbeing of those in custody. Two recent papers discuss these findings, one comparing the UK and Scandinavia, and another focusing on nature contact, wellbeing and safety in the UK. Based on this and other work, Dominique has advised governments and prisons in the UK and elsewhere on prison design. 

Prison, conflict and the military

Despite the fact that many prison personnel have a military background, their role in the prison service remains almost entirely overlooked in the academic literature. Dominique is currently collaborating on a project which explores the contribution of ex-military personnel working within the prison service. At its essence, the project asks whether prison work can ‘rehabilitate’ ex-military personnel for civilian life, whilst they attempt to rehabilitate prisoners, (including the increasing numbers with whom they share a military background), and whether reform of the prison service can be catalysed by its staff. A recent agenda‐setting article introduces the ‘prison‐military complex’ as a means to initiate examination of militarism in relation to institutions and practices of incarceration

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

• 2016-18 Economic and Social Research Council, Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) £15,665 (PI), Therapeutic Environments for Youth Custody
• 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
• 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
• 2014-2017 ESRC 'Fear-suffused environments’ or potential to rehabilitate? Prison architecture, design and technology and the lived experience of carceral spaces £728,000
• "Milieux de mémoirein Eastern Europe", led by Dr Zuzanna Bogumił Akademia Pedagogiki Specjalnej im. Marii Grzegorzewskiej; Wydział Stosowanych Nauk Społecznych Poland 196,660 PLN (c£39k)
• 2012-2016 ESRC 'Breaking the Cycle: Prison Visitation and Recidivism in the UK' £361,000
• 2012-2015 ESRC Seminar Series 'Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigrant Detention' £17,990
• 2011 Visiting Fellowship, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki 'Welfare, Gender and Agency: Women's Imprisonment in Russia' c4,500 Euro
• 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
• 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 Euro
• 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
• 2004-2005 UK Department for International Development 'Non-State Delivery of Services' £81,632
• 2004 UK Department for International Development 'Governance Reform' £54,138
• 2002 British Academy 'The Kremlin Stars and Soviet Ideology' £2,032
• 2000-2001 UK Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions 'Better Value Development Programme' (Research Fellow)
• 2000-2001 UK Social Exclusion Unit/Joseph Rowntree Foundation 'Local Authorities and Social Exclusion' (Research Fellow)
• 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.