Bilyana Petkova

Dr. Bilyana Petkova is a Principal Investigator at the University for National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her project on freedom of speech at the Meta Oversight Board won funding under a national grant scheme (2025-2030). 

Prior to that, Bilyana was a lecturer at Middlesex University in London where she taught International and European Law. She was also the Chair for Law & Society in the Digital Age at the University of Graz, Austria where she taught Law & Technology Courses. Bilyana has also worked as a full-time faculty member at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and the HBKU College of Law in Doha, Qatar. She has conducted research as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellow at the University of Melbourne Center for Comparative Law in Australia, at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington DC, as well as a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and as a postdoctoral fellow at the New York University School of Law.

Bilyana holds a PhD from the University of Kent, UK, and a Master's 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: comparative law, judicial legitimacy, US-EU data privacy and freedom of speech, content moderation

Book: "Fundamental Rights Protection Online: The Future Regulation of Intermediaries" (with Tuomas Ojanen (eds.), Edward Elgar, 2020).