Biography
Estelle Zinsstag (MSc, PhD, FHEA) is a lecturer in criminology at the school of applied sciences at Edinburgh Napier University and a researcher at the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. She is currently the recipient of a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship of the academic year 2024-2025. She is also a research associate at the Centre for Criminology (University of Oxford, UK) after having been its departmental lecturer in criminology in 2019-2020. In addition she is a senior research associate at the Leuven Institute of Criminology (University of Leuven, Belgium). In Leuven she has held a post-doctoral fellowship as part of the FP7 project ‘Alternative’ on RJ in Intercultural Settings. She also coordinated and was principal investigator on 2 European Commission grants, the first one an action grant on Conferencing and RJ (for the European Forum for Restorative Justice) and the second one a Daphne grant on sexual violence and the possibilities of RJ (for the Leuven Institute of Criminology at KU Leuven). She was also a visiting fellow at Cornell Law School (USA).
She is a founding member and a co-chief editor of 'The International Journal of Restorative Justice' and of the book series 'Studies in Restorative Justice' both published by Eleven International Publishing (The Netherlands). She publishes mainly in the fields of sexual violence, restorative justice and transitional justice. Most recently she has published with Dr Marie Keenan the co-authored monograph 'Sexual violence and restorative justice: addressing the justice gap' with Oxford University Press. She is currently working on 2 further books on related topics.
She is co-chair of both the 'Scottish Network of Restorative Justice Researchers' and the Working Group on Restorative Justice at the European Society of Criminology. She is a member of the European Forum of Restorative Justice (in particular of their research committee and gendered violence working group) as well as an associate member of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research (UK). She is a member of the stakeholder group advising Scottish Government on the development of RJ in Scotland and has offered training, consultancy or workshops on restorative justice widely in Europe but also eg in Brazil, Hong Kong, Australia, USA, Jordan and Iran.