Professor Cyra Akila Choudhury graduated with a J.D. (cum laude) and and LL.M from Georgetown University Law Center. She received an MA in Comparative Politics from Columbia University focusing on women, religion and South Asia. She earned her Bachelors in Political Science from The College of Wooster where she won the Frank Miller Prize in Comparative Politics, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated second in her class. Prior to joining the FIU faculty, Professor Choudhury worked for The National Academies advising the federal government on international labor standards and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, one of the largest international law firms in the world, in their corporate finance practice. She returned to Georgetown Law Center in 2005 as the Future Law Professor Fellow for the 2005-2007 term focusing her research on comparative family law and critical legal theory.

Professor Choudhury’s expertise is in international and comparative family law; gender and postcolonial theory; subjectivity and legal theory; and international labor law and labor migration. In addition, she has written and lectured on Islamic law and Muslims as minorities and national security law. In 2012, Professor Choudhury was awarded a grant from the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) at Harvard Law School to study domestic migrant workers from South Asia to the Gulf. She has served as a docent for the IGLP workshops for the past three years. She is part of a number of research groups including the Ottoman Legacies in Post-conflict societies, an initiative started at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, UK; a network of TWAIL scholars whose reach is global; and a critical human rights study group funded by IGLP at Harvard Law School. Professor Choudhury’s work has appeared in the Michigan Journal of International Law, Akron Law Review, and the University of Colorado Law Review. She has appeared as an expert witness in a number of transnational family law cases and has been interviewed by national media outlets on both the Middle East and Islamic law as well as on family law matters. She is a member of the Middle East Studies faculty at FIU.

Currently, Cyra Akila Choudhury is an external PhD candidate at eLaw - Center for Law and Digital Technologies. She is a tenured professor at the FIU College of Law, a public law school in Miami, Florida. Her research and publications focus on feminist theory, comparative and international law, and Islamophobia in the United States. She is an external PhD candidate supervised by Prof. Simone van der Hof and Dr. Francien Deschesne. Her doctoral work will examine how privacy law fails to respond to the inequality exacerbating effects of technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things on families.