Ayesha S. Chaudhry is the Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice. She is Associate Professor of Islamic studies and Gender studies at the University of British Columbia, where she sits on the Board of Governors in an elected seat. She was a 2016-17 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the UBC and she was the 2015-16 Rita E. Hauser fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
She is the author of Domestic Violence and the Islamic Tradition: Ethics, Law, and the Muslim Discourse on Gender (Oxford University Press, 2014). Dr. Chaudhry's research focuses on Islamic legal and theological reform, with eye towards promoting human rights by focusing on women's rights.
Dr. Chaudhry is deeply committed to bridging the academic and civil society divide. In service of this commitment, she is actively engaged in civic discourse around religion. She has consulted on high-level national and international cases concerning human rights and religious pluralism and freedom. She works with NGO and international development organizations to improve women's rights and promote pluralism, and regularly contributes opinion pieces to provincial and national newspapers.
She is currently working on two major projects, one entitled "Feminist Shari'a" and the other "The Colour of God".
