Staff profile
John Shepherd
Biography
I am a historian of the modern United States, focusing on the parallel development of surveillance, criminology, and the human sciences in the twentieth century. I completed my PhD at Durham University in 2024 where my thesis examined psychiatric and statistical attempts to predict and mange future criminal behaviour amongst American youth in various court, custodial, clinical, and school settings from 1900-1960. Now I am engaged in a new project on computer crime mapping in postwar police departments, using methods from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and urban history to understand the origins of predictive policing. Across these projects I am interested in how varied actors and institutions have created or contested new measures of criminal potential with which to target suspected groups and locations.
Research Interests
- History of criminology and the human sciences
- Modern US urban history
- History of policing
- Science and Technology Studies (STS)
- Surveillance Studies
Teaching and Learning
I have taught broadly on the history of science, medicine, and technology in the modern and early modern periods, including the following undergraduate modules:
Department of Philosophy
- Science, Medicine, and Society
- History, Science, and Medicine
- History and Philosophy of Psychiatry
Department of History
- Connected Histories: The Early Modern World, c. 1450-1750