About Kristen R. Ghodsee

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning author and professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as a member on the graduate groups of Anthropology and Comparative Literature. Ghodsee’s articles and essays have been translated into over twenty-five languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, Quartz, NBC Think, The Lancet, Project Syndicate, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung, The Washington Post, and the New York Times.

She is the author of 12 books, including: Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Duke University Press, 2019) and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018 and 2020), which has had 16 international editions in 15 languages. In 2021, she published 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.

Her latest book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, appeared in 2023 with Simon & Schuster.  

Full academic CV here