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Edinburgh Law School Alumni Newsletter - Autumn 2014

Wed 1 October 2014

Alumni newsletter Autumn 2014 cover

Features: 1789 - 2014: Celebrating 225 year of Old College | Welcoming a new Head of School | Class of the 1980s | A week with George Gretton

Welcome from the Head of School

I am really honoured to take up the post of Head of School, and particularly delighted to extend a warm welcome to our alumni. We hope to see many of you in November when we celebrate 225 years of Old College (see page 6 for more details). This is an exciting time, with work starting on our redevelopment in the New Year. Alas, ambitious refurbishment does not come without some practical inconvenience and I am full of praise for our support staff who are working so hard to ensure life for our current students and academic staff will not be disrupted by the building work. I am confident that we can minimize those disruptions and continue to develop and thrive as a School. I am really grateful to all concerned for making it so. I also want to take this opportunity to welcome our new academic staff this semester. Dr Paolo Cavaliere joins us as the new Lecturer in Digital Media/IT Law. Paolo joins us from the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. Dr Filippo Fontanelli has just been appointed to a Lectureship in International Economic Law, having previously taught at the University of Surrey. Dr Haris Psarras, one of our recent PhD graduates, is joining us as a Teaching Fellow in the Legal Theory Team and Dr Annalisa Savaresi is also a Teaching Fellow in Global Environmental Law. Finally Dr Stephanie Bell joins as a Postdoctoral Development Fellow. Stephanie completed her PhD at Warwick and has been working there as a Teaching Fellow until the last few months when she completed an internship in Brussels. Richard Sparks’ Biography Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology and Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. Richard’s main research interests lie in the social and legal aspects of punishment (especially imprisonment); penal politics; public responses to crime and punishment; and the uses, abuses and non-uses of criminological knowledge in shaping public policy on crime and punishment. Richard is the author of Television and the Drama of Crime (1992) and co-author (with Tony Bottoms and Will Hay) of Prisons and the Problem of Order (1996);(with Evi Girling and Ian Loader) of Crime and Social Change in Middle England (2000); and with Ian Loader of Public Criminology? (2010). He has also edited several books including The SAGE Handbook of Punishment and Society (with Jonathan Simon) (2012). Richard is about to celebrate his tenth anniversary at the Law School. Previously he spent 14 years at Keele University, latterly as Dean of Social Sciences, and before that in posts at the Open University and the University of Cambridge.

Prof Richard Sparks
Head of School

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