On 3 November, Sara Serrano Martínez will defend her PhD dissertation ‘The Infanticide Article Under Franco, 1937-1963: ‘Leniency’, Judicial Discretion and Forensic Knowledge’. Serrano analyses how the ‘infanticide article’ in the Spanish Penal Codes from the early decades of the Franco dictatorship (1937-1963) was interpreted and applied by judges. https://www.uu.nl/en/events/phd-defence-sara-serrano-martinez-francos-infanticide-legislation

On 22 June 2023,the FORCE project is organizing a workshop on ‘The History of Bodily Integrity’. You can find the programme here. The body has become an important category of analysis in histories of medicine, and increasingly also in cultural and political history more broadly. One new avenue of research is the theme of bodily…

Are you looking for an exciting and new topic for your BA or MA thesis or would like to do a research internship? I can provide an extensive inventory of primary and secondary sources relating to forensic medicine and psychiatry in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century in the Dutch East…

On 16 and 17 February 2023 we will have the pleasure to welcome visiting scholar prof. dr. Željana Tunić, who is professor of Slavic Cultural Studies at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Together with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the ERC-funded project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe (ReAct), led by prof….

On Tuesday 6 December 2022, the FORCE project had the privilege of welcoming professor Heather Wolffram, from the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, as a visiting scholar to Utrecht University. Heather Wolffram has published extensively on the history of forensic psychology in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Since the…

  Merlijn Barkema Dogs are used by the Dutch police in many different situations for their agility, superior sense of smell or imposing flashing teeth. The tracking and surveillance dogs that perform these jobs are expected to be trustworthy. They should learn to control their instincts. Manuals from the 1910s show that the handlers of…

“Another one of those pretty boys” and “Things that happen”: two examples of headlines in Dutch and Spanish media respectively about rape and its perpetrators in the 1930s. In the first example, we see a fairly condemning – if facetious – accusatory finger pointed at the perpetrator. In the second headline, there is a tone…

On 26-28 August 2021 the FORCE conference ‘Forensic Cultures’ took place. The enthusiasm of all the participants and the high quality of the papers ensured lively discussion. The conference connected scholars and sparked ideas for further research. The theme of the conference cut to the heart of the FORCE project that examines to what extent…

In a team of historians of forensic science, there is bound to be at least one person who has consumed an outrageous amount of true crime and crime fiction. Fans of the wildly popular true crime comedy podcast ‘My Favorite Murder’ have named such people ‘murderinos’. In the FORCE team, it is clear that the…

Our team at FORCE has welcomed an intern, Iris Stofberg, in December 2019. Below is the blog that Iris has written for our project. An important part of our research project is how social or cultural norms – such as ideas about gender –  interact with forensic evidence and expertise. The blog that Iris has written…