In recent years, forensic medicine and science have attained unprecedented visibility, representing a uniquely compelling and at times contentious, example of applied expertise. Dominated by new laboratory-based techniques, modern practitioners and the public they serve live in an apparent era of forensic infallibility, characterised by precision methodologies deemed capable not merely of solving the most intractable of contemporary criminal cases, but also of retrospectively assessing, and often correcting, conclusions derived from past investigations. The declarative powers of modern forensics has penetrated the public imagination, showcased on in daily newspapers, in best-selling novels and on highly rated television shows.

This two session symposium seeks to place these developments in historical and trans-national perspective. Session one, “Spaces and Traces”, focuses on techniques and practices of forensic investigation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on approaches to the identification and interpretation of crime scene traces in China, India and Britain. Session two, “Questions of Expertise”, considers the construction of knowledge in over the course of the twentieth century European court cases arising from a variety of (often contested) disciplinary positions: from dactyloscopists, psychiatrists, criminologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists of the first half of the century, and their neuroscientific and geneticist successors.