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Journal Article 1: Rock, P. (2007). Caesare Lombroso as a signal criminologist. Criminology and Criminal Justice, 7, 117-133.

Abstract: This article is based on a contribution made to a panel discussion at the November 2005 meetings of the American Society of Criminology, a discussion that was triggered by a celebration of Nicole Rafter’s and Mary Gibson’s new translation of Caesare Lombroso’s Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. It dwells on how Lombroso and his book were generally received in the United Kingdom; how his ideas were in the main soon rejected but long memorialized; and how one might attempt to understand some part of why he should have been so dismissed, on the one hand, yet so retained, on the other, by invoking the familiar idea that he has been made continually and dialectically to play a signal, rhetorical role in defining by negation the theoretical backbone of an insurgent feminist criminology.

Journal Article 2: Rafter, N. (2005). The murderous Dutch fiddler: Criminology, history and the problem of phrenology. Theoretical Criminology, 9, 65-96.

Abstract: To form a clear view of the origins of criminology and present-day practices in criminal justice, criminologists need to recognize phrenology as one of their progenitors. Although phrenology is dismissed as a “pseudo-science” and mocked as “bumpology,” it in fact constituted an important early science of the mind, and the theories that phrenologists generated in the fields today called criminology, criminal jurisprudence and penology influenced those fields long after the phrenological map of the brain had been forgotten. Coming to terms with phrenology requires rejecting simple distinctions between “science” and “pseudo-science.” It leads to a better understanding of the scientific project of criminology and, more broadly, to a better understanding of the nature of social-scientific knowledge