Louise Brangan

Biography

Louise Brangan is an academic and writer. She is drawn to issues that concern punishment, injustice, culture and collective memory. She has a background in sociology and philosophy and completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, specialising in the sociology of punishment. 

She has been a visiting Fulbright scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley and a Nominated Fellow at the Institute of the Advanced Study of the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. From 2026, she will be working at the London School of Economics (LSE). 

Her academic book, The Politics of Punishment, is the surprising story of the unusual prison systems that developed in Ireland and Scotland at the end of the 20th century, told from the perspective of civil servants, politicians and prison governors. This wider body work was awarded academic prizes from the British Society of Criminology (best work from a new/emerging scholar) and the journal Theoretical Criminology (best article). 

She has collaborated with artists to produce visual art and sculpture as well as dance theatre. She has written features for the Irish Independent, The Conversation, BBC Radio 3’s The ESSAY, and been a returning guest on Radio 4 arts programming. In 2023, she was named as one of the BBC’s ‘New Generation Thinkers’. 

Her first non-fiction book The Fallen was published by The Bodley Head (UK) and S&S (US) in 2026.