Meet the Director

Professor Neil Websdale is Director of the Family Violence Center at Arizona State University, the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative (NDVFRI) funded by the US Department of Justice, and the LibrES project, funded by USAID. He has published work on domestic violence, the history of crime, policing, social change, and public policy. Dr. Websdale has published six books: Rural Woman Battering and the Justice System: An Ethnography (Sage, 1998) which won the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award in 1999; Understanding Domestic Homicide (Northeastern University Press, 1999); Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control (Aldine Books, co-edited with Jeff Ferrell, 1999); Policing the Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing (Northeastern University Press, 2001), winner of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award in 2002 and the Gustavus-Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Award in 2002; Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers (Oxford University Press, 2010). His latest book, Fatal Family Violence and the Dementias: Gray Mist Killings was published by Routledge in 2024.

Dr. Websdale’s social policy work involves helping establish networks of domestic violence fatality review teams across the United States and elsewhere. He also directs various community informed intimate partner violence risk assessment initiatives, the fatality review and safety assessment projects, and a number of other multiagency and interdisciplinary initiatives. Dr. Websdale trained as a sociologist at the University of London, England and lives and works in Flagstaff, Arizona.