2026 At large Board member: Mélanie M. Tiago

I am honoured to present my application for the position of At-Large Board Member of the European Society of Criminology. I have been a member of the ESC since 2015 and have attended its conferences every year. That involvement is what motivates this candidature: I would like to contribute more directly to the work of a society that has been an important part of my academic life.

My background is in comparative criminology and criminal justice data. I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Lausanne, where I also spent seven years contributing to the SPACE project — work that gave me a close understanding of how cross-national comparisons are built, and where their limits lie. I am currently an Assistant Professor and Vice-Director of the criminology programmes at the Faculty of Law of University Lusófona in Lisbon, and I continue to collaborate with ESEHA in Switzerland on the analysis of data on the Swiss criminal justice system.

If elected, I would focus on three areas. The first is the visibility of national criminological practices: knowledge of how different countries approach crime, prevention, and justice tends to stay within national or linguistic boundaries, and I think the ESC can do more to create spaces for that exchange. The second is representation of the diversity of European criminology within the Society's structures — different legal traditions and research cultures deserve to be reflected in how the ESC organises its work, and I would pay attention to this in everything from conference programming to working groups. The third is support for early-career researchers: having made the transition from doctoral candidate to faculty member recently, I remain aware of what that involves, and I would like to explore whether the ESC could develop more structured mentoring and guidance for junior scholars.

The ESC is one of the few spaces where criminologists from different European traditions can genuinely meet and work together. I would be glad to contribute to that, and I would welcome the support of ESC members.