My name is Matthew Martin (he/him), and I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. My fields of study are public law and comparative politics. My research interests include public participation in constitution-making, authoritarian constitutions, indigenous constitutionalism, Latin American politics, and immigration law and politics. I am in the early stages of my dissertation, which examines the use of public consultation in constitution-making.
Prior to graduate school, I received my B.A. in Political Science and Legal Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After graduation, I worked as a legal assistant in immigration law at a firm in Washington, D.C. I assisted attorneys with family- and humanitarian- based immigration cases ranging from permanent residence to removal defense to asylum. Today I continue to support trans and gender non-conforming asylum seekers, gathering legal resources, contacting lawyers, and organizing fundraisers to ensure their security.
My research agenda focuses on public consultations in constitution-making. I am constructing an original data set of all such public consultations since 1973, which I plan to use for my dissertation. I am also a Senior Research Analyst at the Comparative Constitutions Project working on related topics. We recently developed a new method for analyzing public consultation data using natural language processing (NLP) tools, and our research program continues to grow.