Anna Piela, B.A. (Krakow), M.Sc. (Open University), Ph.D. (York)
I’m a researcher with the experience of working in academic, community, and commercial settings. I’ve worked with the Muslim Women’s Council in Bradford, UK, and been appointed as an editor on the board of Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World.
In 2013-2018 I was a faculty member at the Leeds Trinity University’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies, where I was cross-appointed with the Department of Sociology. In September 2018, I took up an appointment as a visiting scholar with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. While at Northeastern, I completed a book based on my research project about identities of British and American Muslim women who wear the face veil. 
book is titled Wearing the Niqab: Muslim Women in the UK and the US, soon to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. For my journal articles on this topic, see the Publications page.
My second major undertaking, which I am doing while affiliated as a visiting scholar with the Department of Religious Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, involves a collaborative research project titled ‘Managing Spoiled Idenitity: Social Functioning of Polish Female Converts to Islam‘, recently funded by National Science Centre Poland. This project, based at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics’ Middle East and Central Asia Unit, will result in a full-length monograph, now contracted by Brill.
My third project (at a very early stage) looks at women’s mosques in the West. My chapter where I discuss some tentative findings was published in the edited collection Emergent Religious Pluralisms (Palgrave, 2019).
I have recently examined a Ph.D. dissertation on female Muslim identities and Instagram at Queensland University of Technology; I occassionally review book manuscripts for academic presses such as Oxford University Press and Polity.
I completed my Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at the University of York in 2010. My doctoral research explored intersections between sociology of Islam, gender, and media. It also formed the basis of my first monograph titled Muslim Women Online: Faith and Identity in a Virtual World published by Routledge in 2012.
Dr Anna Piela 
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