Role
Dr Kirsty Welsh is a Senior Lecturer at Nottingham Law School. She has previously served as the Deputy Course Leader for Law with Criminology, reflecting her long experience in teaching criminology to law students. She is a module leader on the half-year Criminal Law with Mooting module, having taught Criminal Law throughout her teaching career, and is also a module leader on the Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) module. In addition to lecturing and tutoring on the Criminal Law and CCJ modules, Dr Welsh also tutors on the third year Sexuality and the Law module. She supervises both undergraduate and postgraduate research projects, as well as supervising PhD research.
Dr Welsh welcomes PhD applications in the areas of domestic abuse in particular and VAWG more generally.
Career overview
Dr Welsh was awarded her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2005, with her doctoral research examining policy and practice responses to domestic violence and abuse (DVA). She was soon appointed to a Lectureship in Criminology in the Law School at Sheffield, using this position to develop several modules which focused on Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). With Dr Maggie Wykes, she wrote Violence, Gender and Justice (published by SAGE) to support her teaching in this regard. Dr Welsh then took a long career break, only returning as a lecturer at NTU in September 2017.
Since returning, both her teaching and research have been recognised at NTU. In 2022, she was awarded a NTSU Student-Led Teaching Award and, in 2024, was nominated for a Vice Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr Welsh is also part of the University’s Future Research Leaders Programme. Since 2019, she has been one of the conveners of the Socio-Legal Studies Association’s Crime and Criminal Justice Stream and is responsible for organising the NLS Research Seminar Series. She is a member of the University’s Centre for Rights and Justice and the Critical Criminology and Social Research Group.
Research areas
Domestic Violence & Abuse
Coercive Control
Intimate Image Abuse
Violence Against Women and Girls
Criminal Law
Dr Welsh has written widely around domestic abuse, with three main themes in her work. She continues to be interested in the policy and practice response to domestic abuse, including through partnership working. She has written about the use of Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences as an intervention in high-risk domestic victimisation and analysed the role of risk assessment in responding to domestic abuse. She is also interested in the disclosure of intimate images as a tool of coercion in domestic abuse (‘image-based domestic abuse’), with much of her work in this area focused on problems with legal responses. Dr Welsh has also written about the continued difficulties in how the law deals with cases in which women kill abusers.
With Professor Loretta Trickett, Dr Welsh is currently engaged in a co-production project to conduct survivor voice forums across Nottinghamshire. She is also involved in a joint project with colleagues in Canada (St Francis Zavier, MacEwan and Toronto Universities) on intimate image abuse and was recently part of a team of researchers at NTU, led by Dr James Thornton, which examined judicial use of Sentencing Guidelines on Domestic Abuse.
Dr Welsh is heavily involved with JUNO Women’s Aid in Nottingham and is a founding Trustee of JUNO’s sister organisation, Sirona Homes.
Publications
- Welsh, K. (2005) ‘The Disassociation Between Domestic Violence Service Provision and Multi-Agency Initiatives on Domestic Violence’, International Review of Victimology, 12 (3) 213-234
- Welsh, K. (2007) ‘Partnership or Palming Off? Involvement in Partnership Initiatives on Domestic Violence’, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 47: 170-188
- Welsh, K. (2008) Current Policy on Domestic Violence: A Move in the Right Direction or a Step Too Far?. Crime Prevention Community Safety 10, 226–248
- Wykes, M. & Welsh, K. (2008). Violence, gender and justice. SAGE Publications Ltd,
- Welsh, K. (2023). ‘’Long-term partners – Reflections on the shifts in partnership responses to domestic violence’, International Review of Victimology, 29(1), 27-51.
- Welsh, K. (2023) ‘Responding to “image-based domestic abuse”’, International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, Volume 75,100631.
- Welsh, K. (2024) The Online Safety Act 2023 A New Dawn for Regulating Image-Based Domestic Abuse? in Victimisation in a Digital Age: An Online/Offline Continuum Approach, Munk, T. and Kennedy, M. (eds.) Routledge.
- Welsh, K. (forthcoming) ‘Changing the Law on Intimate Image Abuse: a new Paradigm for Image-Based Domestic Abuse?’ The Journal of Criminal Law
Course(s) I teach on
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Undergraduate | Full-timeCOURSE
Law - LLB (Hons)
https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/nottingham-law-school/ug/llb-law-full-time