Dr Kiran Mehta

I am a historian of Britain and the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a particular focus on criminal law, punishment and coerced labour. I received my B.A. from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY, USA) and my MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford. My doctoral research focused on criminal imprisonment in the London metropolis. The most comprehensive study of English imprisonment in the past thirty years, this work significantly revised the history of the modern prison in Britain. It will be published in Spring 2025 with McGill-Queen's University Press as part of their States, Peoples and History of Social Change series.

Before coming to Leicester, I was a Lecturer in History at Worcester College, University of Oxford from September 2021 and September 2023. I was also a Lecturer at King's College London between January and July 2023. From October 2023 until April 2024, I was a Visiting Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt, Germany. 

My new, Leverhulme-funded project is entitled Making Useful Subjects: Penal Labour in Britain and its Empire (1770-1895). It offers a critical new perspective on the negotiation of citizenship and subjecthood in nineteenth-century Britain and its Empire by exploring political incorporation through the lens of penal labour. Focusing on three key sites (England, Australia and Trinidad), it probes the intersections between the ‘civilising’ mission of penal labour and the ‘civilising’ mission of empire. More particularly, it looks at the motivations and aims that drove British authorities to set prisoners and convicts to work; the contours of penal labour; and the effects of penal labour. The research takes a comprehensive view of penal labour, bringing prisons, penal colonies, and penal settlements, across Britain and Empire, into the same frame. In so doing, it offers the first in-depth comparative exploration of penal labour in Britain and its Empire.