DPRU Research Students and Assistants
Current Oxford Research Students:
Amanda Clift-Matthews is a practising barrister specialising in criminal law and human rights, with a particular emphasis on capital cases and miscarriages of justice. She was formerly in-house counsel and Legal Director at The Death Penalty Project and has represented at the appellate level individuals facing a death sentence throughout the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, including before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. She is a co-author of “Sentencing in Capital Cases” (2018) and was shortlisted for an “Employed Barrister of the Year” award by the Bar Council in 2020. Her DPhil research focuses on capital drug trafficking cases in Singapore.
Matthew Goldberg is a DPhil candidate researching the prohibition of the death penalty in international law, with a focus on human rights forums at the United Nations and the role of digital methods in the development and realisation of human rights. He is an experienced criminal barrister, has lectured in criminal law at King’s College, London, and is a former president of Reprieve Australia. In 2021, he was elected President of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.
Amelia Inglis is a DPhil candidate researching victims and the death penalty at the Centre for Criminology. Her research explores the experiences of homicide victims’ families in the US, seeking to understand how the protracted capital appeals process can militate against recovery for those whose defendants are sentenced to death. Prior to undertaking the DPhil, Amelia completed the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Oxford, after earning her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology with Criminology at the University of York. Amelia has also spent six months interning with the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana.
Abdul Rashid Ismail is undertaking DPhil research on the abolition of the death penalty in Malaysia. Rashid actively litigates in the Malaysian courts on behalf of death row prisoners and those facing capital charges. He has been and continues to be involved in landmark constitutional cases involving the mandatory death sentence, the rights to a fair trial and the rights of the vulnerable including the mentally ill facing execution. His research explores the factors that contribute to the movement for abolition in Malaysia and those that militate against abolition.
Serene Singh is a Rhodes and Truman Scholar and completed her Master's in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. Originally from Colorado, USA, she graduated with Bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Journalism which were awarded summa cum laude honors, as well as attaining a minor in Leadership Studies. For her DPhil, she is researching women on death row in the United States. More specifically, she intends to identify the influence of topics like "cruel and unusual punishment" on the ways in which women undergoing the criminal justice system's capital punishment are experiencing justice. She plans to work directly with women on death row in her research, making this the very first research project on this specific population of individuals to be comprehensively undertaken.
Current DPRU Research Assistants:
Jonathan Hasson is a Research Assistant in the DPRU focusing on the political economy of drugs and the death penalty in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. His doctoral research at the University of Haifa focused on judicial decision-making in criminal courts. As part of this, he conducted a quantitative empirical study, was a visiting fellow at Erasmus Centre for Empirical Legal Studies, and was a visiting student at the Institute of Law and Economics of the University of Hamburg, following his previous fellowship at Cornell Law School. Jonathan holds an LLB from Tel Aviv University and an LLM from the University of Haifa, both with distinction.