Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe

Deputy Chair of Trustees and Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Fellow & Tutor for Graduate Affairs, Pembroke College, Cambridge

Professor Gelsthorpe is Deputy Director at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, and Director of a Research Centre within the Centre for Community, Gender and Social Justice. Beyond this, she is co-convenor of the University-wide multi-disciplinary Cambridge Migration Research Network. Loraine also sits on various University Committees, including the General Board Education Committee and the Board of Graduate Studies.

Loraine has wide interests in the links between criminal justice and social justice, looking at race, gender and social exclusion, women and sentencing, and at the effectiveness of youth and community penalties in particular.

Loraine has lived in Cambridge since the early 1980’s when she came to undertake a Masters in Criminology, following which the call of a PhD was stronger than a return to a social work career. On completion of her PhD, Loraine had a number of postdoctoral research appointments at Lancaster, UCNW (Bangor) and at the London School of Economics, which involved work with the Metropolitan Police and London Boroughs on diversion from prosecution, men’s prisons in the Midlands, and race and gender issues in pre-sentence reports respectively. She began working for the University of Cambridge in 1991.

Professor Gelsthorpe sits on various Government Advisory Committees, was Deputy Chair of the 2014 REF exercise (Social Policy panel), and is immediate past President of the British Society of Criminology. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Loraine, by her own admission, is an 11+ failure and increasingly sees a need to speak out about this - to encourage others whose own routes in higher education may not be traditional.

In her spare time, Loraine is a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, and a Trustee of Pembroke House, a community centre in Walworth, South London, and Women’s Break Out.