‘Q&A’ with Professor Mark Finnane, ARC Laureate Fellow

Abstract

Mark Finnane was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2013-18) to research the history of prosecution and the criminal trial in Australia. He has published widely on the history of policing, crime, the criminal law, punishment and the social history of mental illness. Trained as a historian at the University of NSW (BA Hons 1974) and the ANU (PhD 1979), he is a Professor of History in the School of Humanities, Griffith University and a member of the Griffith Criminology Institute. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (elected 2001), and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (elected 2013). As an ARC Laureate Fellow he directs the Prosecution Project, investigating the history of the criminal trial in Australia. The Project is currently digitising the registers of Supreme Court cases, creating a database that includes the names of accused as well as their offences and the outcomes of the trials. This base data is extended through use of other archival sources and supplemented by the Trove digitised newspapers (http://trove.nla.gov.au). This project is supported by the ARC and Griffith University.

Keywords

• mark finnane
• trove
• prosection project