Name Michael Arntfield | ||
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Michael Andrew Arntfield is a Canadian academic, author, true crime broadcaster, university professor, criminologist, Fulbright scholar, and former police officer.
Contents
- Academic and police careers
- Cold case research
- Television
- Murder City
- Cyberbullying research
- Books
- Articles in edited books and anthologies
- Journal articles
- Essays and editorials
- References
Academic and police careers
Arntfield was a police officer and detective in London, Ontario from 1999 to 2014 when he left policing to accept a customized academic appointment at University of Western Ontario where he teaches what he calls "literary criminology" in a combined English literature, professional writing, and crime studies program. The program developed in part from a scholarly book series he was invited to co-direct by Peter Lang Publishing in New York, and through which he coined the term "the criminal humanities". Arntfield completed his PhD at Western in 2011 while working in a plainclothes police unit and with his dissertation focusing on police murders in the United States and Canada.
Cold case research
In 2011, Arntfield created a student-run unsolved crimes think tank and case evaluation study group known as the Western Cold Case Society. The volunteer initiative was modeled on an earlier undergraduate course on serial homicide and crime history that Arntfield designed and taught while completing his doctorate and still a police officer. The Society receives roughly 30-50 requests for review and audit per year, mostly from private citizens and the families of murder victims who have grown frustrated with police inaction or ineffectiveness.
Television
Arntfield’s work has also served as the inspiration for several television productions currently on air or in development. Aside from appearing as a regular commentator on crime in the Canadian media, including as an expert panelist on the CBC’s long running investigative documentary series The Fifth Estate, he also hosts and helped create the true crime reality series To Catch a Killer, which airs internationally on the Oprah Winfrey Network and on subsidiaries of the A&E Network and CBS across Europe, Asia, and Oceania. In May 2015, Arntfield was retained by HBO’s British distributor to be the spokesperson for the DVD and digital release of the true crime documentary The Jinx, and was used to explain to European media the investigative value of documentary journalism with respect to cold cases.
Murder City
Arntfield has also authored or co-authored over a dozen books, including the best-selling and controversial Murder City for which he is arguably best known. In the book he advances a hypothesis, often employing an epistolary format through the use of a now deceased detective’s original diary notes, that over a specific interval in the 1960s and 1970s, the city of London, Ontario spawned or otherwise housed more serial killers per capita than any city in Canada, and likely beyond. In 2015, it was announced that Emmy Award-winning Sullivan Entertainment had acquired the television rights to the book, and that a dramatic network series was in development even ahead of the book's release date. Arntfield is signed-on to serve as both co-executive producer and technical consultant for the series.
Cyberbullying research
Arntfield currently holds a Canadian federal research grant to study the sociolinguistic underpinnings of cyberbullying, trolling, and other forms of cyberdeviance and electronic harassment. Having collected over 40,000 samples of cyberbullying text from news message board and social media sites and analyzing their contents, Arntfield has published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and research papers appearing in textbooks in which he argues that cyberdeviance in many cases has a distinct sexual and fantasy-based component. He argues that cyberbullying and acts of trolling should therefore be understood as being more akin to a paraphilia than traditional physical bullying. In 2016, Arntfield will serve as the visiting Fulbright Research Chair in crime and literature at the English department at Vanderbilt University after being selected as part of a rigorously competitive process overseen by the U.S. Department of State. He will be furthering his research on literary criminology and cyberbullying while there, as well as developing a Vanderbilt iteration of his Cold Case Society. He will return to Western in the fall of 2016.