Pauline Dirven

Winner Dissertation Prize 2025

Report by the selection committee 

Anyone who watches crime dramas knows that forensic experts play a prominent role. After a murder, they appear alongside the police. These days, a forensic pathologist may even become one of the main characters in a series, as is the case in The Sommerdahl Murders. The pathologist in this Danish series is a woman, seen both in protective clothing at the autopsy table and in summer dresses during her time off. Occasionally, she even becomes personally involved in solving the case. 

This female forensic pathologist bears no resemblance to the stereotypical image of the forensic expert that took shape in British culture between 1920 and 1980. Yet that stereotype is also very familiar to us from the media: men who epitomize objectivity and rationality, often dressed in dark three-piece suits or long white laboratory coats. 

In her excellently written dissertation, Pauline Dirven shows how this stereotypical image of the British forensic expert was constructed within the legal system and through public media appearances. She approaches the subject from multiple perspectives. For example, she examines how experts presented themselves in court and in media performances through their clothing and emotional restraint. She also examines the role gender conventions played in this and how the experts dealt with the bodily remains of murder victims. 

Dirven’s dissertation excels in connecting current theoretical approaches in the fields of emotions, embodiment, virtues and gender with case studies from British legal practice. This perspective leads to an entirely new view of British forensic culture in the twentieth century. The author unpicks step by step how impartiality and objectivity were embodied and cultivated by forensic experts. She also shows how emotional practices contributed to this, such as masking emotions in facial expressions and carefully maintaining a separation between the public and private domain. These practices were embedded in the socio-cultural scripts of the British stiff upper lip. 

Also compelling is the analysis of the Ruxton murder case of 1935. In it, Dirven shows how differently experts dealt with body parts. Mechanical objectivity and the task of identifying a victim and connecting them to a deceased person were sometimes at odds with each other. 

The jury appreciates not only the excellent combination of theory and historical practice, but also the broader applicability of this research. The methods and insights are also relevant for other geographical and temporal contexts and invite comparative follow-up research. Anyone who has read this dissertation will in any case never look at forensic experts in contemporary crime dramas in the same way again.