Leonie Thies

Leonie is a sociologist focusing on the criminal legal system, sociology of law and policing. For her DPhil project, she is doing an ethnographic study on 'alternatives' to punishment in the Berlin youth justice system. Specifically, she looks at how youth diversion is practised and what this tells us about citizen making, punishment and its alternatives. Leonie works as an editor of the Talking about Methods podcast by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. She is a founder and co-convenor of the Discussion Group "Abolitionist Imaginaries and Praxis". She taught at Worcester College, University of Oxford and at the Social Science Institute of Humboldt University Berlin where she was a visiting researcher in 2024/2025. This year, Leonie is teaching on the undergraduate module 'Criminology and Criminal Justice' at Oxford's Law Faculty.

She has completed a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Social Sciences (sociology and political sciences) at Humboldt-University Berlin in Germany and spent exchange semesters at the Università di Bologna and Universiti Sains Malaysia. During her studies, she worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University and at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). After graduating, she was a research fellow at the WZB and in the research group 'Sociology of Law' at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Her Master's was funded by the 'German Academic Scholarship Foundation'. The Humboldt Graduate School supported her transition from MA to doctoral studies through the 'Humboldt Research Track Scholarship'. Her DPhil is fully funded by the Villigst Scholarship.