Tom Daems
My name is Tom Daems and I am currently an associate professor (hoofddocent) at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC), KU Leuven. Before taking up this position in Leuven I was an assistant professor in criminology and sociology of law at Ghent University. Over the years I have developed a particular interest in sociological, legal and normative questions related to punishment as well as in questions related to the development of criminology more broadly. At LINC I coordinate research line 8 on ‘Punishment and Control’ which aims to foster, in particular, research in the field of (comparative and European) penology and prison studies.
Europe and European criminology have defined many aspects of my education as well as my professional and personal life. During my studies in criminology, I spent three months as an Erasmus/Socrates student in Austria at the Karl-Franzens University in the beautiful city of Graz. Here I participated in a programme on European criminal policy and I wrote a comparative paper, in German, on Aussergerichtlicher Tatausgleich. After finishing my first degree I studied political science and European criminology in Leuven, and in 2002 I moved to London for one year to study at LSE’s Department of Sociology, with Stanley Cohen as my tutor.
Over the past decade I’ve spent several research visits at the Universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham as well as at the LSE and I have been involved in teaching at UPF in Barcelona. I’ve attended and participated in all ESC meetings since 2006 (Tübingen), with the exception of the Bologna annual meeting (in 2007), which was just weeks before finalising and submitting my PhD dissertation. On a personal level, I am happily married to a Spanish linguist and our three kids are being brought up in a bilingual family (Dutch – Spanish).
Much of my research and published work has a European focus. I published European Penology? (2013, Hart Publishing) with Dirk van Zyl Smit and Sonja Snacken. This was followed by several other books: Europe in Prisons (2017, Palgrave Macmillan, with Luc Robert), Europa waakt (2018, Universitaire Pers Leuven, with Stephan Parmentier) and Privatising Punishment in Europe? (2018, Routledge, with Tom Vander Beken). My inaugural lecture (2017) outlined some of the challenges for the future of European penology and elaborated some of the ideas that I first developed in a paper for the British Journal of Criminology (‘Slaves and Statues: Torture Prevention in Contemporary Europe’, 2017, 56(3), 627-643).
In addition to my passion for (European) penology, I’ve developed a deep interest in criminology in general and the role key thinkers play (or have played) in its history, present and future in particular. In my book Making Sense of Penal Change (2008, Oxford University Press) I reviewed the literature on contemporary punishment and penal change, focussing on the work of four leading scholars (David Garland, John Pratt, Hans Boutellier and Loïc Wacquant). Over the past decade I’ve been involved in several book projects (as author or (co)editor) devoted to the lives and works of Zygmunt Bauman (Boom, 2007), David Garland (Boom, 2009), Stanley Cohen (Routledge, 2016) and Achiel Neys (Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2016). I am currently editing a special issue of the Dutch journal Tijdschrift over Cultuur & Criminaliteit with Bas van Stokkom devoted to the theme ‘Significant Others’, with papers on life and work of Pieter Spierenburg, Abram de Swaan, Chrisje Brants, Hans Boutellier and Chris Eliaerts. Since 2015 I have edited the Routledge Key Thinkers in Criminology book series with Tim Newburn, Shadd Maruna and Kelly Hannah-Moffat.
I am currently working on two book manuscripts, one on the sociology of victimisation (for the Key Ideas in Criminology-series of Routledge—I’ll say more on this at this year’s ESC meeting in Ghent at a special session devoted to the work of Jan van Dijk) and one on the functions of electronic monitoring (for Palgrave Macmillan, a small book inspired by the 1977 classic De funkties van de vrijheidstraf of Dutch criminologist Willem Nagel). I am also editing a book Criminology and Democratic Politics (Routledge) with my colleague Stefaan Pleysier, with elaborated papers that were presented at a two-day symposium we recently organised in Leuven (24 – 25 April) at the occasion of the conferral of a doctorate honoris causa to Richard Sparks, in order to celebrate 90 years of criminology in Leuven.
More information on my work and current projects is available at this webpage: https://www.law.kuleuven.be/linc/english/staff/00043491 My twitter handle is @eurocriminology.