Dr Rachael Burns
Associate Lecturer

Profile

Biography

I completed my bachelors degree in Law and Criminology at Keele University in 2008. I then went on to study for my masters in Criminology at The University of Kent in 2009. I stayed at Kent for my ESRC funded 1+3 masters in Methods of Social Research and PhD in Criminology and graduated in July 2018.

My particular fields of interest are genocide, war and state crimes. This arose from a school trip to Dachau at the age of fifteen and a visit to Auschwitz and Auschwitz Birkenau at the age of sixteen with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Research

Overview

My PhD thesis examined the architecture and topography of Nazi concentration camps in Germany, how they developed over time, and how this impacted on the empathy and sympathy displayed by civilians in the nearby regions towards inmates therein.

More broadly, I am interested in the scholarship of Norbert Elias and Hannah Arendt, memory and memorialisation, Holocaust denial, violence, architecture, prisons, the history of crime and punishment, death and sequestration.

I’m honestly a very cheery person!