Biography
MICHAEL WELCH is a Professor in the Criminal Justice program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA) where his research interests include punishment, Foucault studies, and human rights. His key writings have appeared in such journals as The British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, The Prison Journal, Crime, Law & Social Change, and Social Justice. Welch is author of Crimes of Power & States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror (2009, Rutgers University Press), Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror (2006, Rutgers University Press), Ironies of Imprisonment (2005, Sage), Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex (2002, Temple University Press), Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest (2000, de Gruyter), Punishment in America (1999, Sage), and Corrections: A Critical Approach (3rd edition, 2011, Routledge). His newest books are titled: Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism & the Pull of Punishment (2015, University of California Press), and The Bastille Effect: Transforming Sties of Political Imprisonment (2022, University of California Press.
He served as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, as well as a Visiting Professor at Facolta di Giurisprudenza, Universita Degli Studi di Bologna (Italy), Facultad de Ciencias Juridicas y Sociales, Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina), and in the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney (Australia). In 2017, he was a Visiting Research Professor in the Faculty of Law, University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). More recently, Welch is a Visiting Professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology, Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics.
For more information about Professor Welch, please visit his website www.professormichaelwelch.com.