Kristen Ghodsee
Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a Member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Before 2017, she spent 15 years as a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of seven ethnographic books on Eastern Europe, including: The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke UP 2005), Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton UP 2009), Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism (Duke UP 2011), Red Hangover: Legacies of 20th Century Communism (Duke UP 2017), Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity During the Cold War (Duke UP, 2019, also in Bulgarian), and Taking Stock of Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions with Mitchell A. Orenstein (Oxford UP 2021). She has also written two mentorship books to help emerging scholars navigate their academic careers: Professor Mommy: Finding Work Family Balance in Academia, with Rachel Connelly (Rowman & Littlefield 2011) and From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read (Chicago 2016, also in Chinese).
Ghodsee has served ASEEES in many capacities over the last two decades. She has been both the Secretary and the Programming Coordinator for the Soyuz Network of Postsocialist Cultural Studies as well as an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS). She served on the AWSS Graduate Student Essay Prize Committee and on the Heldt Essay and Book Prize Committees. She also served as a Program Committee member for the 2012 meetings in New Orleans, and in 2013 she served as the Associate Program Chair for the ASEEES meetings in Boston. Between 2017-2019, she served a three-year term as a member of the ASEEES Distinguished Contributions Committee. As a Member-at-Large on the Board, Ghodsee will champion diversity and inclusion and interdisciplinarity.