I am an Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at the University of Idaho.  I have been at the UI since the fall semester of 2006.  Before that, I was a graduate student in Criminal Justice at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice in Newark, NJ.  I graduated with my PhD in Criminal Justice in May 2007, making my first year at the UI a pretty busy one.

Before starting graduate school in 2001, I lived in France where I was born and raised, studying clinical psychology.  I never gave up on my psychological interests and am in the process of completing a second PhD, that one in psychology at the University of Rennes, in France.  There, I investigate the possibility of a phenomenological approach to the homicide crime scene.

Being an expat has not only been at the heart of who I am (not quite American, but not really French anymore either…), but also at the heart of my research.  I am truly persuaded that an internationally comparative approach in the social sciences is necessary in today’s world.  Based on this assumption, my dissertation examined the certification of the manner of death (whether a death is qualified as natural, a homicide, a suicide, or an accident) in a medical examiner’s office in France, and compared it to the way it was done in New Jersey.  I have also looked into whether moral panics can spread from one country to another, and I intend to continue on carrying research on both sides of the Atlantic on the criminological topics that interest me.

Generally speaking, I focus on violent crime and methodological issues of crime and public health data collection in an international context.  My primary interest is in homicide and violent death research, and I am currently working on two sets of data: homicide data from the Newark, NJ Police Department, and mortality records from the Regional Medical Examiner’s Office in Newark, NJ and the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Rennes, France.  In the future, I hope to expand my interests to general issues of harm reduction and structural factors to community safety.

At the University of Idaho, I try to put my special expertise to use by teaching classes that pertain to my research specialization and general interests: Justice Policy Issues, Comparative Criminal Justice Systems, and Violent Crime.

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