Ian Caistor-Parker

• PhD student, University of Warwick

I am a historian researching Kenya with a primary focus on punishment and incarceration. My doctoral research, funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC), provides a history of the Kenyan Prison Service c.1950–1983.

My work centres on the themes of violence and reform - unequal but ever-present shaping forces in Kenya's colonial and post-colonial penal landscape. This research has led to related articles on the workings of the Colonial Office's Treatment of Offenders Committee and on Kenya's previously unconsidered pre-Mau Mau detention camp system.

I have a secondary research interest in contemporary Kenyan discussions about Human/Ancestral Remains, their relationship to UK museum holdings, and the navigation of contested colonial histories.

Ian Caistor-Parker is a third-year PhD student whose thesis is on the history of the Kenyan Prison Service c.1950-1983. One of the project's key themes is violence (broadly defined), particularly change and continuities in practices and discourses across the watershed of formal decolonisation. My work intersects with critical strands of criminology, and I am currently working on two projects in this area - violence is a prominent theme in both. Firstly, I am researching colonial penal policy towards British-ruled Africa in the mid-20th century. Secondly, I am writing about how to develop critical historical approaches to the study of empire.

• –present PhD student, University of Warwick

• University of Oxford, MSc in African Studies

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