Paulina Niechciał is an assistant professor at the Center for Comparative Civilization Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She holds MA degrees in ethnology and in Iranian studies, and a PhD in Sociology, for which she wrote a dissertation based on field research in Iran on the collective identity of contemporary Zoroastrians in Tehran. She also studied Persian language and literature at the International Center for Persian Studies at the University of Tehran in Iran, and was a visiting professor at Utica University (New York State), the University of Rochester, and the Academy of Sciences in Tajikistan. She received a scholarship from the Polish Minister of Science for outstanding young scholars.Her academic pursuits focus on the study of minorities and identity, the anthropology and sociology of religion, enriched over time by interests in diaspora and gender studies. She is the author of many articles, book chapters and the book Zoroastrian Minority in Modern Tehran: On Collective Identity in the Context of Shi’a Domination (in Polish; Kraków 2013). In 2019, as a recipient of the Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship, and hosted by Indiana University in Bloomington, she conducted fieldwork that resulted in this book.