The Rev. Dr. Anna Piela is a scholar of gender and Islam, with areas of expertise that include feminism in Islam, Eastern European Islam, and Islam in popular culture and digital media. She has conducted research with Muslim women of diverse backgrounds in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. She received her Ph.D. in Women's and Islamic Studies from the University of York, U.K. Her first book: Muslim Women Online: Faith and Identity in the Virtual World (Routledge, 2012) explored theological alliances between Muslim women who use digital technologies to facilitate the creation of women- centered interpretations of the key Islamic texts. Her second book, Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), focuses on the voices of women who choose to wear the niqab (the Islamic face covering) in the West. Having interviewed 40 women on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Piela discusses how women respond to controversies, bans, and debates involving the niqab in Europe and North America. Simultaneously, she argues for shifting the attention to niqab-wearing women's concerns and their incisive diagnoses of problems plaguing secular-liberal societies, including endemic racism, sexism, and nativism.