The Editor, Colin Sumner
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Now 76, retired at 53 and 68. LLB (Birmingham), LLM (Criminology, Sheffield), MA (Teaching Services, Cambridge), PhD (Sheffield), FRSA. Now focussing on editing this and another website coming soon, and writing some long overdue books after a decade in educational management.
I was a devoted university teacher from 1970-2018, and the sole author of two best-selling books: Reading Ideologies: an investigation into Marxist theory of Ideology and Law (1979) and The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (1994, reprinted by myself as CrimeTalk Books in 2012 in English and in Spanish).
I also edited several books that pioneered developments in critical criminology: Crime, Justice and Underdevelopment (1982), Crime, Justice and the Mass Media (1982), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (1990), Social Control and Political Order (1997, with Roberto Bergalli), Violence, Culture and Censure (1997), Policing in a Multicultural Democracy (2000, with Harry Lorenzo), and The Blackwell Companion to Criminology in 2004.
In 1997, with Prof. Piers Beirne. at SMU in Maine, USA, I launched and edited a major international journal for Sage Publications: Theoretical Criminology. I also edited a book series, New Directions in Criminology with the Open University Press.
Teaching has always been as important to me as writing and I have developed, launched and directed over a dozen criminology degrees: at 3 universities: East London, Salford and Cork, Ireland. Whilst Head of Law at UEL, despite the odds, we established a law school extension from scratch in Haifa, Israel, in 1997 as a joint 'education for peace' project. Despite enthusiastic Presidemtial approval, it was always doomed to fail, a nightmare to administer and in 2000 succumbed to the fear of Hamas bombs. Later, I created, validated and launched Ireland's first undergraduate BA (2014) and PhD (2016) degrees in criminology: they still stand today as monuments to the possibility of change in Ireland. When I retired, I had increased the participation of mature students, mostly women, to a fifth of each cohort and was proud of the international partnerships I had created with St Mary's, Halifax, Nove Scotia, Ørebro University in Sweden and was just creating a further one with Cal State U, Sacramento when I got the well-used UCC/Irish bullying push [for no obvious reason]. My undergrads protested formally and my 6 PhD students were appalled. So I resigned at my top, having had enough of the nonsense and created the 3rd most popular undergrad degree in the country [after Law and Medicine] and enjoying an informal advisory role with Michael D., the excellent President of the Republic. I am reminded of Don McLean - the day the music died....but in my case only after a long series of fights against a variety of establishments. I rest in peace whilst fit enough to be captain of Derbyshire Seniors Tenpin Bowling team.
I realized in the wilderness of retirement that I fell in love with my first full-time job in 1974 at UCW Aberystwyth, a sociology lecturer in a beautiful place with a warm community. I taught a whole course on Marx's Capital [can you imagine?], and discovered yet again my in depth interest in social theory. My undying thanks to our Prof, professor Jaap Van Velsen, for appointing someone he saw as having a Millsian "sociological imagination" and having the courage of his convictions. At Aber I was also able to establish my teaching of the sociology of crime and deviance. Barry Smart, Ian Taylor, Bridget Pym and Maurice Roche at Sheffield U., Peter Gibbon and Roy Bailey at Sheffield Poly. and Mike Brogden at Bristol Poly. had all previously fostered my passion for understanding how the moral world worked.
From 1977-95, I became a Lecturer in Sociology at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge University, and a Senior Member of Wolfson College and Fellow of Hughes Hall. Cambridge for a lad from the lower working-class, divorced parents and no money! I played a lot of cricket as a weekly anaesthetic and got involved with some wonderful female scholars. For 18 years, I flew the flags of sociology, socialism and 'the North' with hard-fought gains over teaching methods and over MPhil. admissions over sexism, racism, and class bias. Apart from many brainy youngsters doing PhDs and undergrad dissertations, I supervised research by several high-flying criminal justice practitioners, some of whom, like Mike Nellis and Paul Condon went on to do greater things. During the 1980s I supervised a brilliant group of PhD students, next door to Steven Hawking and his crew, and my success with their success earned me an MA for Teaching Services when I left for a professorship.
Two of my edited books were with my postgrad students at Cambridge (1990 and 1997 above), and I supervised 18 doctorates to successful completion and over 200 Master's dissertations. Several of these students are now distinguished professors, such as Keith Hayward, Penny Green, Alison Young, Richard Sparks, Cathi Albertyn, Robyn Eckersley and Richard Vogler.
Over 35 articles of mine are published, many reprinted or translated, and recent ones include the essays "Criminology through the looking-glass", in Amatrudo & Rauxloh's Law in Popular Belief (2017, Manchester UP), "Measure for Measure: Justice in the Society of Censure", in Jacobsen's Poetics of Crime (2014 ed.), and "Critical realism, overdetermination and social censure" in Crewe & Lippens' What is Criminology About? (2015 eds., Routledge). The full range of my scholarly work has recently been very accurately summarized and interpreted by David Moxon (2020, Palgrave MacMillan) in his Colin Sumner: Criminology through the Looking-Glass. David's bibliography lists all my published articles and reviews. It was also celebrated in a book edited by Anthony Amatrudo in 2017 entitled Social Censure and Critical Criminology: After Sumner (Palgrave MacMillan). My claims have also been discussed at length by US scholars in The Death and Resurrection of Deviance by Delving, M., Kotarba, J. & Pino, N. (eds. 2014, Palgrave MacMillan).
I was also Director of the Cambridge M.Phil. in Criminology 1981-5, on the Institute of Criminology’s Management Committee and its surveillant Advisory Committee in the House of Lords for many years . In passing, I was an External Examiner at various universities in criminology, sociology and art history, and in 1994-5 an Assessor in Sociology and Social Policy for the Welsh Funding Council.
With commitment to quality teaching comes management responsibilities. I became Head of School or Dean twice: 1995-2000 in Law, University of East London [UEL], and in Sociology, Philosophy, Criminology, Government & Politics at University College Cork [UCC] in the Republic of Ireland, 2013-17. In 2015, at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, I chaired the launch by Irish President Michael D. Higgins of UCC's research centre on the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society; his speech is posted here in CrimeTalk.
On 'sabbaticals', when at Cambridge, I enjoyed stints as Distinguished Visiting Professor of of Sociology, at Queen’s, Kingston, Ontario; a Visiting Professor of Sociology at St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; a Visiting Professor of Criminology at Barcelona and Hamburg Universities; a Visiting Professor of Law at the Universities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Victoria, BC, Canada; and in 1979, my first one, a Visiting Research Fellow in Law and Society at the University of California at Berkeley.
As Head/Dean of Law in East London, I led a multicultural School with over 1100 students and 50 staff on various sites in 2 countries, whilst also active on Academic Board, Professorial Designations Committee, International Marketing, and Research & Research Degree Committees. I fostered a vibrant research culture in the School of Law and galvanized a team that achieved remarkable advancement in subsequent Research audits. As Head of School at UCC, I fought the case for the social sciences, brought the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy closer together, and managed the integration of Government and Politics into the School; whilst being Programme Director of BA, MA and PhD programmes in criminology. As its Head of Criminology, I remain very proud of expanding mature student admissions, seminar teaching, postgraduate development resulting in a national award for one student, personal tutoring and finally the institutionalization of critical thinking; not to mention the BA degree structure and style that the students loved and which attracted partnerships with universities in several countries.
