Maynooth University Department of Law is delighted to welcome Dr Sinead Ring as lecturer in Law.
Sinéad joined the Department of Law at Maynooth in September 2019 from Kent Law School where she was a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Graduate Studies. She has also taught lectured law at NUI Galway and University College Cork. She has held visiting positions at Osgoode Hall’s Institute for Feminist Legal Studies, Harvard Law School, Melbourne Law School and University of Technology, Sydney. Before entering academia Sinéad was a legal researcher at the Law Reform Commission.
Sinéad is an expert in criminal law and evidence, victims’ studies and feminist legal studies. Her research explores legal responses to sexual violence. Sinéad is currently working on a monograph Legal Responses to Historical Child Sexual Abuse (forthcoming 2020 with Routledge).
Sinéad welcomes potential research students in sexual violence and the law; law and gender; feminist legal studies; criminal law; the law of evidence and criminal justice.
Sinéad is happy to answer media queries about criminal law, criminal justice and sexual violence.
Research
Sinéad’s research explores how law creates social, cultural and political meanings about historical child sexual abuse for victim-survivors, perpetrators, institutional actors, and society. Using insights from psychology, political theory and criminology, her work unpacks law’s discursive power (in civil and criminal law and in commissions of inquiry), and imagines better legal responses to historical child sexual abuse.
Sinéad’s research on historical child sexual abuse has been funded by the Irish Research Council and the Socio Legal Studies Association. She has published in numerous international journals including The International Journal of Evidence and Proof and Social and Legal Studies and edited collections.
Sinéad is currently working on a monograph Legal Responses to Historical Child Sexual Abuse (forthcoming 2020 with Routledge) with Dr Kate Gleeson (Macquarie Law School) and Prof Kim Stevenson (Plymouth). This book examines the construction of child sexual abuse in the present by adopting a historiographic perspective exploring and comparing the responses of the law and legal institutions to historical child sexual abuse in Australia, Ireland and the UK.
Sinéad is also interested in legal responses to sexual violence against adults. The first strand of this work is around the role of law in the production of knowledge about sexual violence. She has published on the admission of counselling and therapeutic records in rape trials, and on the notion of consent to sexual intercourse in Irish law. The second strand of this work relates to the role of employment and anti-discrimination law in combatting sexual misconduct in higher education. At the University of Kent Sinéad was instrumental in the design of institution-wide policies on responding to and preventing sexual violence against students, and in successfully bidding for Higher Education Funding Council for England funds to support implementation of these polices. In November 2018 Sinéad was appointed by Minister for Higher Education Mary Mitchell O’Connor, T.D. to the Expert Advisory Group on Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions. The group’s report, Safe, Respectful, Supportive and Positive. Ending Sexual Violence and Harassment in Irish Higher Education Institutions was published in April 2019 and is available online here. The Report provides a framework for sectoral change to foster positive institutional cultures of respect, dignity and integrity that are effective in tackling sexual misconduct.
Sinéad is an editorial board member of feminists@law, an online open access journal of feminist legal scholarship (available online here).
Sinéad is happy to supervise research students working in the following areas: institutional violence and the State; sexual violence and the law; law and gender; feminist legal studies; criminal law; evidence law and criminal justice.