Prof. Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee

University of Pennsylvania
Anthropology/Gender Studies/East European Studies

External Senior Fellow (EURIAS Programme)
August 2014 – July 2015

Last Update: 23.06.2025

Curriculum Vitae

Kristen R. Ghodsee is the author of twelve books and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as a member of the Graduate Groups in Anthropology, History, and Comparative Literature, and is a former president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. 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. 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, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The New Republic, 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 Bold 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.

Selected Publications

Ghodsee, Kristen. Everyday Utopia: What 2000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life (Simon & Schuster, 2023) [Utopien für den Alltag:Eine kurze Geschichte radikaler Alternativen zum Patriarchat, Suhrkamp Verlag , 2023]
Ghodsee, Kristen. Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women Verso Books, 2022.
Ghodsee, Kristen. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Bold Type Books, 2018. [Warum Frauen im Sozialismus besseren Sex haben: Und andere Argumente für ökonomische Unabhängigkeit. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019]
Ghodsee, Kristen and Mitchell Orenstein. Taking Stock of Shock: Social Consequences of the 1989 Revolutions. Oxford University Press, 2021
Ghodsee, Kristen. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

FRIAS Project

Women in Red: Communist Mass Women’s Organizations and International Feminism during the Cold War

Women in Red is a book-length manuscript that examines the lasting influences of women from the former Eastern Bloc countries on the development of progressive women’s movements in Africa. During the Cold War, the women’s committees in state socialist countries developed rich bilateral relationships with women in many newly independent nations as part of a larger program of political, economic and cultural exchanges between the “Second World” and the “Third World.” Using ethnographic interviews and archival research, the book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the forgotten links between Africa and Eastern Europe through the lens of women’s organizing.

Using the case study of the Committee for the Bulgarian Women’s Movement (CBWM), the book recuperates the history of international socialist women’s activism. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Bulgarians engaged in a wide variety of capacity building exercises with progressive African women. These include the hosting of training seminars and courses, the provision of travel stipends for African women to attend international conferences, and the funding of scholarships for African girls to pursue university studies in Bulgaria.

The book will argue that state socialist women’s organizations were key actors during the U.N. Decade for Women (1975-1985). By mobilizing women from the developing world, women from the Eastern Bloc may have instigated Cold War competition over which economic system could provide more de facto and de jure equality to women. This was a rivalry that benefited all women in the long run, whether they lived in the “First,” “Second,” or “Third” Worlds.