An ethnographer of the social costs of the post-1989 transition
Traveling through Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 became the turning point that led her to study both the hopes and costs of the transition.
Kristen Ghodsee is an American anthropologist and scholar of Eastern Europe whose ethnographic work examines how socialism and the transition from it shaped ordinary lives, especially women’s lives. Drawing on fieldwork in Bulgaria, she has studied socialist achievements alongside the losses of transition, recovering material experiences often obscured by triumphalist anti-communist narratives. Co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein, Taking Stock of the Shock compares economic and social indicators after the 1989 revolutions and argues that the gains of transition were distributed unevenly. Her work neither idealizes socialism nor accepts its replacement as an uncomplicated success, insisting that the consequences of capitalism must be assessed through evidence and people’s lived experience.
Career Timeline
- 1970Born in San Diego, California, United States
- 1992B.A. in creative writing and theater arts, University of California, Santa Cruz
- 1990년대M.A. and Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
- 2005Published The Red Riviera, an ethnography of women’s work in Bulgaria’s Black Sea tourism industry
- 2012Received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2017–현재Professor of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2021Published Taking Stock of the Shock with Mitchell A. Orenstein
- 2022–현재Chair of Russian and East European Studies, University of Pennsylvania
- 2023Published Everyday Utopia