Tsvetelina is a DPhil candidate in public international law at Merton College. Her DPhil, supervised by Professor Dapo Akande, focuses on the regulation of accidents and mistakes under the law of armed conflict and international criminal law. She is the first recipient of the James Upcher Memorial Scholarship, established by Fietta LLP and the Oxford University Law Faculty.
Tsvetelina holds law degrees from Sofia University ‘St Kliment Ohridski’ (LL.M) and the University of Oxford (MJur, Dist; MPhil). She was a Merton Lawyers’ Scholar during her MJur and was awarded the Planethood Foundation Prize for best paper in International Criminal Law and a Merton College prize for her overall performance in the exams.
She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Public International Law at the Law Faculty (2019-2020) and also teaches Public International Law for the Stanford in Oxford Program (2017; 2019-2020) and the Department for Continuing Education (2020). Tsvetelina organises and teaches on the annual Sofia Summer School on Human Rights held in Bulgaria.
Tsvetelina was the Chief Editor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research Group in 2018 and 2019 and has, since 2019, been a headnoter for the European Human Rights Reports published by Sweet & Maxwell. Tsvetelina is also an assistant to Federica d’Alessandra, Executive Director of the Programme on International Peace and Security at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC).
In 2019, Tsvetelina interned at the Policy Branch of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (New York) with the generous support of the Global Justice Internship Fund. In autumn 2020, she will be a visiting researcher at Cornell University. For this visit, she was awarded a grant by the Brettschneider Fund.