Pauline Dirven MA

Pauline Dirven is a PhD candidate in the FORCE project. She obtained both her bachelor’s degree in History and her research master’s degree in Modern History from Utrecht University. Her research interests are gender, the body, and travelling culture and knowledge. Her doctoral research focuses on forensic culture in England. More specifically, it looks at embodied performances of modern forensic expertise. The aim of this project is to uncover how, and to what degree, the modern experience of estrangement helped to shape the performance of forensic expertise in the English, criminal, adversarial legal system, 1920-2000. To answer this question, Pauline analyses how forensic scientists and doctors used their bodies in examination practices and how they displayed themselves before a lay audience, in court and in the media.