People
Professor Neil Chakraborti
Neil Chakraborti is Director of the Centre and a Professor in Criminology at the School of Criminology. Over the past 15 years he has been commissioned by a range of funding bodies to design, conduct and manage groundbreaking research studies on diversity and hate crime.
Dr Amy Clarke
Amy Clarke is a Research Fellow in Hate Studies and has both taught and researched in the field of hate crime for the last decade. Her research has focused on the ‘hidden’ racism, discrimination and targeted hostility experienced by new migrants, asylum seekers and refugees living in the UK.
Dr Chris Allen
Chris Allen is an Associate Professor in Hate Studies with almost two decades of expertise in researching Islamophobia, the British and European far-right, radicalisation and religiously-motivated hate more broadly.
Dr Claire Davis
Claire Davis is a Lecturer in Criminology with over 10 years of expertise in researching and publishing on police occupational culture,power, authority and leadership, and diversity in policing. Claire’s current work focuses on the experiences of ethnic minority police officers.
Dr Matt Hopkins
Matt Hopkins is an Associate Professor in Criminology and Director of the East Midlands Violence Reduction Information Network (VRIN). His work spans a broad range of areas in relation to violence, crime prevention, commercial victimisation and acid attacks. He is regularly involved in applied research projects and evaluations of national government programmes.
Dr Rachel Keighley
Dr Rachel Keighley (she/they) is the vice-chair of the British Society of Criminology Hate Crime Network and Research Associate in Criminology at the University of Leicester. Rachel is currently working on a research project studying racism in rural England. Rachel earned her PhD specialising in online hate targeting LGBTQ+ young people. Her work focuses on the harms of every day hate, our understanding of identity and difference, and how we can best respond to online hate through policy, practice, and activism.
Mulka Nisic
Mulka Nisic is a Research Project Officer at the University of Leicester, with prior experience as a Project Manager at the University of Derby on an ESF funded project. Additionally, I am pursuing a PhD, my research spans nine European countries, exploring the lived experiences of individuals in recovery. The focus is on understanding the role and the impact of recovery capital, stigma and discrimination in the recovery process, and examine gender differences.
Adrian Yip
Adrian Yip is a sociolinguist, currently working on the Rural Racism project at The Centre for Hate Studies. He completed his PhD in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London in 2022. He is interested in the relationships between language and social inequality, and has expertise in discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics and conversation analysis. His most recent article in Corpora discusses gender-bland sexism in online sports news, and the challenges faced by female athletes as they manage the tension between femininity and athleticism.
Emily Wertans
In my role as Research Assistant for the Centre for Hate Studies I support the various current and upcoming research projects of the team, as well as improving local and national understanding on how to receive and respond to hate. In addition to this, I am completing a PhD exploring hate, harassment and mistreatment directed towards homeless people within Leicester. Within this research, I use creative and arts-based research methods to support diverse and seldom-heard voices in communicating their experiences, feelings and views.
Doctoral Research
Please see the videos below to learn more about recent doctoral research from within the field of Hate Studies undertaken at the University of Leicester: