Mary Francesca Bosworth

Mary Francesca Bosworth is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford where she founded and co-directs the international research network Border Criminologies. She is the author of a number of books, including Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons, Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (2010), (with Carolyn Hoyle) the edited book What is Criminology? (2011), (with Katja Aas) the edited book The Borders of Punishment (2013), Inside Immigration Detention (2014), Bordered Lives (2020) with Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol and Christoph Balzar, and Supply Chain Justice (2025). From 2009 to 2024 Mary Bosworth was the UK Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theoretical Criminology.

Life

Bosworth studied arts at the University of Western Australia. She then attended the University of Cambridge where she gained an MPhil and a doctoral degree in criminology. She worked in the United States for eight years, returning to the United Kingdom in 2004. She is currently Professor of Criminology and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford in England.

Work Bosworth has published a number of papers and books on race, gender and citizenship, particularly on prisons and immigration detention. In all her work Bosworth examines how individuals negotiate the institutional constraints of their confinement and how that confinement reinforces and is reinforced by their prior experience of poverty, violence and abuse. In summer 2012 Bosworth was awarded a 5-year European Research Council Starter Grant.