Staff profile

Jianxuan is a PhD candidate at Durham Law School. Before her PhD, she earned a Bachelor of Law from Minzu University of China (2017-2021). Following this, she achieved her Master of Law degree from Georgetown University Law Center (2021-2022), where she received the Georgetown Law Merit-Based Scholarship, graduated with Distinction, and was honored on the Dean’s List. Deepening her passion for Criminology, she subsequently completed an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Edinburgh (2022-2023), graduating with high Merit. Her Master's dissertation on hate crime against Chinese residents in Edinburgh, with a focus on victimhood experiences, was published in the Journal of Criminal Law.

She was awarded the Modern Law Review Scholarship for both 2024/25 and 2025/26 in support of her PhD research. In 2025/26, she was further honoured with the Mike Redmayne Scholarship, awarded to the best applicant in criminal law and related fields that year. She has also been awarded a fully-funded fellowship by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law, where she will spend a three-month research stay in the summer of 2025.

At the Law School, she is currently a part-time tutor, teaching seminars on Introduction to English Law and Legal Methods (ELLM) and tutorials on UK Constitutional Law for the 2024/25 academic year. She has also delivered a guest lecture on the third-year module Punishment and serves as Deputy Director of the Centre for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice.

Current Research

Jianxuan’s PhD research, supervised by Prof Thom Brooks and Dr Zhiyu Li, focuses on the conceptualisation and implications of penal populism.

Penal populism is a form of populism. It is a social phenomenon in which the general public advocates for harsher punishment of offenders, emphasising the common-sense notion of 'just deserts' and the perspectives of laypeople. This project aims to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding penal populism: how to define it, what the driving forces are, and how this social phenomenon impacts the criminal justice system. It integrates existing social science terminology, critiques neoliberalism’s influence on public perceptions of crime and punishment, and explores punishment philosophy, among other related areas. The goal is to elevate the study of penal populism to a more theoretical and even philosophical level while ensuring it remains firmly grounded in existing academic knowledge.

• Criminal Law, Criminology, and Criminal Justice

Conference Paper

• Penal Populism: Emotional Demands for Power and Punishment as ‘Legitimate Vengeance’
  
  Hu, J. (2025, July 1 – 2025, July 4). Penal Populism: Emotional Demands for Power and Punishment as ‘Legitimate Vengeance’ [Conference paper]. Presented at British Society of Criminology Conference 2025, Portsmouth.

Journal Article

• Invisible Scars: Understanding the Experiences of Hate Crime Among Chinese Residents in Edinburgh
  
  Hu, J. (2025). Invisible Scars: Understanding the Experiences of Hate Crime Among Chinese Residents in Edinburgh. Journal of Criminal Law. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220183251336406

Presentation

• Punishment as a Public Sentimental Outlet in a Neoliberal Era: Understanding Penal Populism
  
  Hu, J. (2025, April 15). Punishment as a Public Sentimental Outlet in a Neoliberal Era: Understanding Penal Populism. Presented at The Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference 2025, Liverpool.
• Penal Populism: A Perspective on Social Shifts and Psychosocial Demands
  
  Hu, J. (2024, September 11). Penal Populism: A Perspective on Social Shifts and Psychosocial Demands. Presented at 24th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, Bucharest, Romania.