Dr. James Windle is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University College Cork. He holds a LLM in International Law with International Relations from the University of Kent, and a PhD in Criminology from Loughborough University/Midlands Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice. He is chair of the ISS21 Crime and Social Harm (CSH) research cluster.

Prior to joining UCC, James was Senior Lecturer of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of East London, where he was Programme Leader for the BA Criminology and Psychosocial Studies. He was also a Fellow of the UEL Terrorism and Extremism Research Centre. James has worked with, or acted as a consultant to, a variety of local and national government departments, non-governmental organisations and law enforcement agencies. He is also a qualified electrician, a trade he worked in for almost ten years before entering academia.

His primary research focus has been on illicit drug markets, illicit enterprise, street gangs, organized crime and the history of prohibition. He is author of Suppressing Illicit Opium Production: Successful Intervention in Asia and the Middle East (IB Taurus, 2016), co-author of The Desistance Journey: Into Recover and Out of Chaos (Palgrave, 2018), lead editor of Historical Perspectives on Organized Crime and Terrorism (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of Giving Voice to Diversity in Criminological Research: 'Nothing about Us without Us' (Policy, 2022). 

 

He is author, with colleagues from the Department of Sociology and Criminology and School of Law, of Criminology, Crime and Justice in Ireland: An Introduction (Routledge, 2022), Ireland's first criminology textbook,  He has published extensively in prominent peer-reviewed social science journals and non-refereed outlets, including Newsweek and RTÉ Brainstorm.

James is interested in supervising PhDs in any of his research interests, although he has broad criminological interests so is open to discuss supervision in other areas.