Short bio
Kristen R. Ghodsee is the award-winning author of twelve books and a professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have been translated into over twenty-five languages and have appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Die Tageszeitung. She’s appeared on the PBS NewsHour and France 24 as well as on dozens of podcasts, including NPR’s Throughline, WIRED’s Have a Nice Future, Vox’s The Gray Area, and The Ezra Klein Show. Her critically acclaimed 2018 book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, has appeared in 15 languages. Her latest book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, with Simon & Schuster, is a “fascinating” (The Wall Street Journal), “spirited and inspiring” (Jacobin), and “refreshingly optimistic and accessible” (The Nation) tour through the ages in search of the thinkers and communities that have dared to reimagine how we might better arrange our domestic lives.
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Kristen Ghodsee also serves as a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology and is former president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. Her recent books include: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019, in Bulgarian from Iztok-Zapad, 2020) and Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions with Oxford University Press (co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein). She hosts the podcast, A.K. 47 - Forty-seven Selections from the Works of Alexandra Kollontai, which inspired her 2022 book, Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women (available or forthcoming in English, Italian, Turkish, Slovak, French, and Portuguese).
Kristen Ghodsee has held residential research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC; the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany; the Imre Kertész Kolleg at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität in Jena, Germany; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany; the Aleksanteri Institute of the University of Helsinki in Finland; and the Center for History at Sciences Po in Paris. In 2012, Ghodsee was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.
Kristen Ghodsee is a frequent public speaker, appearing at international events such as the HowtheLightGetsIn Festival in London, The New Zealand Festival of the Arts, and Belgium’s Manifiesta Festival and the Festival des Libertés. She is a lover of basset hounds, an avid collector of manual typewriters, an amateur photographer, and if forced to pick one, would probably choose Picard over Kirk.