Victor Bailey

Victor Bailey is the Charles W. Battey Distinguished Professor of Modern British History, and between 2000 and 2017 was Director of the Joyce & Elizabeth Hall Center for the Humanities, at the University of Kansas. He has degrees from the Centre for the Study of Social History, University of Warwick, and the Cambridge University. He was a research officer at the Centre for Criminological Research, University of Oxford, and a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and at Worcester College, Oxford. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation have supported his research.

He is the author of Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914-1948 (Oxford University Press, 1987) and ‘This Rash Act:’ Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford University Press, 1998), and editor of Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain (Rutgers University Press, 1981; Routledge, 2016). In 2014, he published the following two books: Order and Disorder in Modern Britain: Essays on Riot, Crime, Policing and Punishment; and Charles Booth’s Policemen: Crime, Police and Community in Jack-the-Ripper’s London.

In 2019 he published The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895-1979 (Routledge). In 2021, he published Nineteenth-Century Crime and Punishment (Routledge), a four-volume documentary history of the 'long' nineteenth century, 1776 to 1914. Each volume contains a scholarly introduction to the subject of the volume, plus headnotes annotating each document.