BIO

Kristen R. Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a Member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles and essays have been translated into over twenty languages and have appeared in publications such as The New Republic, The Lancet, Ms. Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She is also the author of nine books, most recently: 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 already had fourteen international editions. Her latest book is Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein with Oxford University Press. Ghodsee has held visiting fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki in Finland, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany, and at SciencesPo in France. She was also awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in Anthropology and Cultural Studies.

Mitchell A. Orenstein is Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies at University of Pennsylvania and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His sole-authored and co-authored works on the political economy and international affairs of Central and Eastern Europe have won numerous prizes. His book, From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2018), with Prof. Hilary Appel, won the Laura Shannon Prize Silver Medal of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies in 2021. It develops a new theory of the political economy of transition based on “competitive signaling” that explains the enduring triumph of neoliberalism in the region from 1989-2008. He was previously the author of prize-winning comparative studies on the global campaign for pension privatization, Privatizing Pensions (Princeton University Press, 2008), and Out of the Red: Building Capitalism and Democracy in Postcommunist Europe (University of Mighigan Press, 2001), as well as two World Bank studies on European social policy. Roma in an Expanding Europe: Breaking the Poverty Cycle, co-authored with Dena Ringold and Erika Wilkens, won the Voter’s Choice Award for the most innovative analytical and advisory activity and the World Bank Europe/Central Asia Knowledge Fair in 2004 and helped launch the “decade of Roma inclusion” campaign, a joint initiative of the World Bank, European Union, and Soros Foundation. Orenstein has lived and worked in Britain, France, Czechia, Poland, and Russia and, prior to joining the Penn faculty in 2015, held academic appointments at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Syracuse, Northeastern, Johns Hopkins, and Moscow State Universities.