Ian Loader

Ian Loader is Professor of Criminology and Professorial Fellow of All Souls College. He is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Ian is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Ian is the author of numerous books, edited collections, theoretical and empirical papers, and works of civic engagement on security, public and private policing; sensibilities towards dis/order and justice; penal policy and culture; crime control and political ideologies, and the democratic purposes of criminology. His current work coalesces around aspects of environmental harm.

Ian is presently in receipt of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2025-2028) for a project entitled 'Car harms: Automobility and the objects of criminology'. The project seeks to use the car, and systems of automobility, as a vehicle through which to explore what it means practice criminology in the midst of a climate breakdown. Ian is also teaching a graduate seminar on ‘Criminology and the car’. A background article for this project has been published in the Annual Review of Criminology, as well as a brief paper on 15 minute cites and auto-freedom. 

Ian recently completed a three-year study entitled ‘Place, crime and insecurity in everyday life’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The study – conducted with Evi Girling (Oxford), Richard Sparks (Edinburgh) and Ben Bradford (UCL) – investigated how people living in one English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, talk about and act towards a range of threats that they regard as impinging upon their safety (their personal bodily integrity, their property, their locality, their wider habitat). An early theoretical prospectus for the study appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Criminology. A summary of project findings can be found here. Papers from the study have been published in Criminological Encounters, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, the British Journal of Criminology and Criminology & Criminal Justice. A book drawing on the research - entitled Ecologies of Security: Everyday Disorder in a Climate-Changed World - is due out in 2026.

Ian has, in recent years, been a member of the Advisory Board for the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales and of the Research Advisory Board of the Canada/Nova Scotia Mass Casualty Commission. Ian was Editor-in-Chief of the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice from 2016-2025.

Ian supervises doctoral students working on the sociology of policing and security. He is particularly keen to work with students and post-doctoral researchers addressing problems of everyday in/securities, environmental harms, criminology and (auto)mobility, and the politics of security and justice.