Dr Anna Souhami is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law. Anna is an ethnographer, and her current research is an ethnography of policing in the remote Northern islands of Scotland. Through extended fieldwork in two remote archipelagos, her research explores how order is maintained in remote islands and the role and culture of police work within them. Her work examines the importance of weather, light and darkness, landscape, gossip and festival to order maintenance, and considers the implications for our understanding of both policing and criminology more widely.  The first major paper from this project, 'Weather, light and darkness in remote island policing: expanding the horizons of the criminological imagination' won both the European Society of Criminology Policing Network prize for best article and the British Society of Criminology Policing Working Group prize for best article, and was shortlisted for the British Journal of Criminology Radzinowicz Prize. 

Anna's previous ethnographies include a study of policy making in central government through an extended ethnography of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB), the public body responsible for the oversight of the English and Welsh youth justice system; and a study of the formation and operation of Youth Offending Teams (YOTs), the multi-agency organisations which deliver youth justice services throughout England and Wales. She is the author of Transforming Youth Justice: occupational identity and cultural change (Willan, 2007) and (with Janet Foster and Tim Newburn) of a major Home Office research study of policing in England and Wales after the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. 

Anna's most recent grants include a Carnegie Trust Research Incentive Grant (2016-17), and a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust small grant (2016-17). She has previously been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2013-14) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2004-2007). She has a PhD from the Department of Criminology, University of Keele, an MSc in Social Policy and Administration from LSE and a BA in Literae Humaniores (Classics) from Oxford University.   Anna was Head of Criminology at Edinburgh Law School from 2017-2022. Her external appointments include: Associate Director and Edinburgh lead for the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (SCCJR) from 2016-2020; member of the British Journal of Criminology editorial board 2014-2020; external examiner on the Professional Doctorate in Leadership in Children and Young People's Services at the University of Bedfordshire 2009-2014; external examiner for the Youth Justice programme at the Open University 2016-2017; and from 2017-2022 the external examiner for the Department of Criminology at the University of Leicester. She has advised the Ministry of Justice on the future of the Youth Justice Board, Police Scotland on local approaches to policing, and in 2022 was appointed consultant to the Mass Casualty Commission in Canada. 

Anna teaches on a number of criminology undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including those on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, and she welcomes applications from prospective PhD students.

Dr Anna Souhami's Homepage at Edinburgh Law School