Elwin Hofman is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders at the KU Leuven Cultural History Research Group. His research concerns the social and cultural history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, with a special focus on crime and criminal justice and emotions, sexuality and the self. His current research project concerns the cultural history of criminal interrogation, in which he attends to the rise of ‘psychological’ techniques in criminal interrogations after torture was abolished in France and Germany in the late eighteenth century.