Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and Director of Oxford’s Centre for Criminology. He is also Professorial Fellow of All Souls College, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

Ian is the author of six books, including Public Criminology? (Routledge, 2010, with Richard Sparks), and six edited volumes, including The SAGE Handbook of Global Policing (with Ben Bradford, Bea Jauregui and Jonny Steinberg, 2016). Ian has published theoretical and empirical papers on policing, private security, public sensibilities towards crime, penal policy and culture, the politics of crime control, and the public roles of criminology.

Ian is currently working on a three-year ESRC-funded study entitled ‘Place, crime and insecurity in everyday life: A contemporary study of an English town’. The study – conducted with Evi Girling, Richard Sparks (Edinburgh), Ben Bradford (UCL) and Sergen Bahceci (Oxford) – investigates how people living in one English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, talk about and act towards a range of threats that they regard as impinging upon their safety (their personal bodily integrity, their property, their locality, their wider habitat). In the mid-1990s, three members of the research team addressed earlier versions of these questions through a study of people’s fears and feelings towards crime and social order in Macclesfield in Cheshire. The outcomes of this work were published in a book, Crime and Social Change in Middle England (2000). The team is revisiting Macclesfield, a quarter of a century later, to undertake a new study of people’s everyday experiences of in/security against the backdrop of rapid social, political and technological change.

Ian is Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice and a member of the Research Advisory Board of the Canada/Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission.