Bilyana Petkova

Dr. Bilyana Petkova is a Professor of Law & Society in the Digital Age at the University of Graz, Austria where she has initiated an online lecture series on Advanced Topics of Law & Technology and teaches graduate seminars on Urban Law & Technology. Prior to that, Bilyana was a full-time faculty member at Maastricht University in the Netherlands where she taught European Law and a full-time faculty at the HBKU College of Law in Doha, Qatar.

Bilyana has also conducted research as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellow at the University of Melbourne Center for Comparative Law in Australia (summer 2018), at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington DC (fall 2019), as well as a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University School of Law.

She holds a PhD from the University of Kent, UK, and a Master in Studies of Law from the Yale Law School. Her paper "The Safeguards of Privacy Federalism" was the first non-American scholar's piece to win a Young Scholars Award at the Eight Privacy Law Scholars Conference at the University of Berkeley, California (2015) and a draft of her article "Privacy as Europe's First Amendment'' (2019) was later nominated for an award.

Research interests: federalism and technology, cities, data trusts, judicial legitimacy, comparative law, US-EU data privacy and freedom of speech; platform regulation. 

Book projects: "Privacy and the City: How Data Shapes City Identities" (with Ira Rubinstein, forthcoming NYU Press); "Fundamental Rights Protection Online: The Future Regulation of Intermediaries" (with Tuomas Ojanen (eds.), Edward Elgar, 2020).