David Doyle

Dr David Doyle is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Elevate Fellow at the Centre for Criminology. In 2013, David was awarded this prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie (Irish Research Council Co-Fund) International Career Development Fellowship to conduct a research project entitled, A History of Prisoner Mortality 1842-2012. Working under the aegis of Professor Mary Bosworth and Professor Ian O’Donnell (University College Dublin), this longitudinal study will examine cause-specific deaths (violent and non-violent) among male and female inmates in six Victorian prisons in the major cities of Ireland and the United Kingdom (1842-2012) and chart changes and continuities in patterns of mortality over this period.

David read History and Politics at University College Dublin where he graduated with BA and MA degrees, before completing his doctorate and a Bachelor of Laws degree (with first class honours) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A previous recipient of an IRCHSS doctoral scholarship, his PhD thesis, Sexual Crime and the Formulation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935, investigated the incidence and prosecution of reported sexual crime against children in the formative years of the Irish state and provides a critical analysis of the law governing child sexual abuse in twentieth century Ireland. In 2010, David returned to UCD where he has since been awarded a highly competitive IRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011), an IRC New Ideas Award (2011) and an IRC New Foundations Award (2012) to further his research on capital punishment in twentieth century Ireland. The objective of this interdisciplinary project was to analyse capital punishment in post-partition Ireland, and investigate whether the progress to abolition in the respective jurisdictions of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic was territorially idiosyncratic or influenced by European values and international human rights law. More recently, David was also awarded a Research and Networking Grant in the IRC Digital Poster Competition, Why My Research Matters.