Dana Rabin specializes in the history of eighteenth-century Britain
with an emphasis on crime, law, gender and race. her first book, Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England, is a study of the language of mental states in the English courtroom. The book sets legal sources within a cultural context to reveal the relationships between emotion, responsibility, gender, and citizenship in the eighteenth century.

Her current project examines intersection of
metropole and colony through an analysis of legal events involving criminal
trials, law suits, legislation and riot that unfolded in London in the second half of the eighteenth
century. This litigation became newsworthy because each instance revolved
around the presence of outsiders at home. These legal cases became scandals
because they exposed the contradictions in Britain's ideology of equality,
rights, and freedom and the imbrication of metropole and colony. In this period
the boundary between empire and home was not clearly drawn: this study uses legal
events as a prism through which to analyze the complexities wrought by empire
and how the law created, delineated, maintained and managed categories of difference.