Dr Milena Tripkovic awarded British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship
Thu 16 April 2026
Dr Milena Tripkovic, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Associate Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR), has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, receiving £152,000 to support her research project, ‘The Criminal Citizen: Migration, Belonging, and Punishment’.
Her fellowship project examines how the use of penal power towards citizens, as full members of political communities, has changed in recent decades, becoming increasingly severe, hostile, and exclusionary. Focusing on citizenship deprivation on penal and security grounds in Western Europe, the research explores how contemporary penal instruments used specifically against citizens have both expanded and hardened, blurring the distinction that had previously protected citizens from the kinds of rejection and expulsion more commonly associated with the treatment of non-citizens.
The book emerging from the fellowship, which is under contract with the Oxford University Press, will examine the types, dynamics, and causes of these practices, as well as their normative foundations. The book’s original argument traces these shifts back to the migration-induced changes in the ethnic composition of post-Second World War European states.
Dr Tripkovic said: “I am immensely grateful to the British Academy for funding this research which will look at modern denationalization laws through the perspectives of migration, belonging and the state’s use penal power. This approach promises to provide more nuanced understanding of the motivations of liberal states to give up on their citizens.”
The British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship scheme supports outstanding researchers in the humanities and social sciences to undertake a significant piece of independent research.
Learn more about Dr Tripkovic’s work