About Kristen Ghodsee
Kristen Rogheh Ghodsee is an American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is primarily known for her ethnographic work on post-Communist Bulgaria as well as being a contributor to the field of postsocialist gender studies. She was critical of the role of Western feminist nongovernmental organizations doing work among East European women in the 1990s. She has also examined the shifting gender relations of Muslim minorities after Communist rule, the intersections of Islamic beliefs and practices with the ideological remains of Marxism–Leninism, communist nostalgia, the legacies of Marxist feminism, and the intellectual history of utopianism. In 2004, Ghodsee published one of the first articles considering the gendered aspects of the growing Communist nostalgia in Eastern Europe. Ghodsee won the 2011 Ethnographic Fiction Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for the short story "Tito Trivia," included in her book, Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism. Ghodsee argues the 100 million estimate favored by the foundation is dubious, as their source for this is the controversial introduction to The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois.
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