Kristen Ghodsee

In 2004, Ghodsee published one of the first articles considering the gendered aspects of the growing Communist nostalgia in Eastern Europe.[12] Already beginning in the late 1990s, various scholars were examining the phenomenon of Ostalgie in former East Germany and what had been called Yugo-nostalgia in the successor states of the former Socialist Yugoslavia.[13] This earlier work on the emergence of Communist nostalgia focused on its consumer aspects and considered the phenomenon a necessary phase that post-Communist populations needed to pass through in order to fully break with their Communist pasts.[14] In contrast, her concept of "red nostalgia" considered how individual men and women experienced the loss of the real material benefits of the socialist past.[15][16] Rather than just a wistful glance back at a lost youth, red nostalgia formed the basis of an emerging critique of the political and economic upheavals that characterized the postsocialist era.[17][18]

Ghodsee has explored the politics of public memory about Communist states, World War II, and the Holocaust in Bulgaria.[19][20] According Ghodsee, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a conservative anti-communist organization which seeks to equate communism with murder such as by erecting billboards in Times Square which declare "100 years, 100 million killed" and "Communism kills."[21] Ghodsee posits that the foundation, along with counterpart conservative organizations in Eastern Europe, seeks to institutionalize the "Victims of Communism" narrative as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and the victims of Communism (class murder).[21][22] 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.[21] She also says that this effort by anti-communist conservative organizations has intensified, in particular the recent push at the beginning of the global financial crisis for commemoration of the latter in Europe, and can be seen as the response by economic and political elites to fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of devastated economies and extreme inequalities in both the East and West as the result of the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. Ghodsee argues that any discussion of the achievements under Communist states, including literacy, education, women's rights, and social security is usually silenced, and any discourse on the subject of communism is focused almost exclusively on Stalin's crimes and the double genocide theory.[22]

In her 2017 book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism, Ghodsee posits that the triumphalist attitudes of Western powers at the end of the Cold War, and the fixation with linking all leftist and socialist political ideals with the horrors of Stalinism, allowed neoliberalism to fill the void, which undermined democratic institutions and reforms, leaving a trail of economic misery, unemployment, hopelessness and rising inequality throughout the former Eastern Bloc and much of the West in the following decades that has fueled the rise of extremist right-wing nationalism in both the former and the latter. She says that the time has come "to rethink the democratic project and finally do the work necessary to either rescue it from the death grip of neoliberalism, or replace it with a new political ideal that leads us forward to a new stage of human history."[23]

Ghodsee's later work combines traditional ethnography with a literary sensibility, employing the stylistic conventions of creative nonfiction to produce academic texts that are meant to be accessible to a wider audience.[24] Inspired by the work of Clifford Geertz and the conventions of "thick description", she is a proponent of "literary ethnography."[25] This genre uses narrative tension, dialogue and lyrical prose in the presentation of ethnographic data. Furthermore, Ghodsee argues that literary ethnographies are often "documentary ethnographies", i.e. ethnographies whose primary purpose is to explore the inner working of a particular culture without necessarily subsuming these observations to a specific theoretical agenda.[26]

Ghodsee's third book, Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism, combines personal ethnographic essays with ethnographic fiction to paint a human portrait of the political and economic transition from Communist rule.[27] While some reviewers have found the book "compelling and highly readable",[28] and "an enchanting, deeply intimate and experimental ethnographic narrative",[29] others have faulted the book for telling a story "at the expense of theory."[30] That the book was judged "remarkably free of academic jargon and neologisms"[31] produced very "mixed feelings"[30] within the scholarly community, with one critic stating that "the somewhat unconventional technique of incorporating fiction alongside her [Ghodsee's] ethnographic vignettes feels a bit forced."[32] Outside of academia, however, one reviewer claimed that Lost in Transition "is very easy to read and is, in fact, impossible to put down, largely because it is so well-written."[33]

Ghodsee's 2010 book, Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria was awarded the 2010 Barbara Heldt Prize for the best book,[34] by a woman in Slavic/Eurasian/East European Studies,[35] the 2011 Harvard University/Davis Center Book Prize[36] from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the 2011 John D. Bell Book Prize[37] from the Bulgarian Studies Association and the 2011 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology[38] from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe[39] of the American Anthropological Association.[40]

Ghodsee won the 2011 Ethnographic Fiction Prize[41] 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.[42] Together with co-author, Charles Dorn, Ghodsee was awarded the 2012 Best Article Prize from the History of Education Society (HES) for the article in the journal Diplomatic History: “The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: UNESCO, Communism, and the World Bank.”[43] In 2012, she won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in anthropology and cultural studies.[44][45][46]

• (Audio) "What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal." The Ezra Klein Show of The New York Times. June 9, 2023.
• (Video) "Do women have better sex under socialism? Ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee has an answer." France 24, October 6, 2021.
• (Audio) "Sixth Bulgarian Sets Himself on Fire to Protest Poverty," an interview with Marco Werman on The World.
• (Audio) Kristen Ghodsee discusses nostalgia for communism in Bulgaria with Lisa Mullins on BBC/PRI's The World
• (Audio) Kristen Ghodsee on Nostalgia for Communism on Northeast Public Radio
• (Audio) Kristen Ghodsee discusses headscarves in Bulgaria with Lisa Mullins on BBC/PRI's The World
• (Audio) "Sixth Fire Suicide in Bulgaria," Interview on Voice of Russia (UK Edition), March 21, 2013.
• (Video) Kristen Ghodsee discusses The Red Riviera with George Liston Seay on Dialogue
• (Video) Kristen Ghodsee discusses communist mass women's organizations on ILO TV
• (Print) Кристeн Годси: "Българските жени са приспособими, упорити и готови да поемат и най-големите предизвикателства"
• (Audio) New Podcast Features Dr. Kristen Ghodsee - American Anthropological Association, January 24, 2014
• (Print) Bulgaria: Manufacturing Mass Distraction and Conspiracy Theories (Interview with Kristen Ghodsee)
• (Print) The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) interview, September 2014
• (Print) No Scrubs Jacobin, November 29, 2018
• (Print) Want Better Sex? Consider Moving to a Socialist Country. Truthdig, December 21, 2018