Luiz Dal Santo

Luiz is a DPhil candidate in Criminology, looking at the conditions of possibility for mass incarceration in Brazil in times of re-democratisation and social inclusion. His research is supervised by Professor Ian Loader. He has been recipient of awards and grants from the Oxford Law Faculty, Oxford Centre for Criminology, and Wolfson College.

Luiz is a Tutor in Criminology at Hertford College and St Catherine's College. He has taught as an Associate Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Law, the University of Roehampton, and in graduate programmes in Brazil, and as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Oxford Law Faculty. Luiz has also worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex and as a Research Assistant at the Oxford Centre for Criminology and at the University of Hull. He co-founded and co-convened the Southernising Criminology Discussion Group, and has co-organised the five editions of the international conference Punishment in Global Peripheries (online; Oxford/UK; Mumbai/India; Santa Fé/Argentina; Cape Town/South Africa).

As a result of his collaborative work, he has co-edited one Special Issue on punishment in global peripheries (published in Theoretical Criminology), and three edited volumes – one on Southernising Criminology (Routledge), one on Punishment in Latin America (Emerald), and one on local and regional features of incarceration in Brazil (D'Plácido, in Portuguese). He is currently working with colleagues on a Special Issue on Colonialism and Penality, to be published in Critical Criminology in 2025.

His main research interest is the sociology of punishment, and his broader interests include the political economy of punishment, punishment and democracy, Southern Criminology, and judicial decision-making. He has published one monograph titled A Punicao no Brasil: Crítica do Giro Punitivo (Punishment in Brazil: critique of the punitive turn), and nearly 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on punishment, penal populism, prison, policing and police violence, racism and criminal justice, Southern Criminology, and Criminal Law. His work has been published in English, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, and can be found on his Research Gate and Academia page.

Prior to commencing his DPhil, Luiz worked as a lawyer in Brazil, having majored in Law at the Mackenzie Presbyterian University (Brazil). He then completed graduate courses in Criminal Law at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Criminology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and National University of Litoral (Argentina). He also holds an MA in Critical Criminology and Social Security from the Universities of Padua and Bologna (Italy).

Luiz has served as a peer reviewer for several journals, including Punishment & Society; Law & Social Inquity; the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice; International Criminology; the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy; Justice, Power and Resistance; Studi Sulla Questione Criminale; Revista Brasileira de Ciências Criminais; Revista Liberdades; and Crítica Penal y Poder. He has also served as a reviewer for book publishers such as Routledge and Springer.