Kristen Ghodsee, Bowdoin College associate professor wins Guggenheim Fellowship
Ghodsee is one of 181 scholars, artists and scientists to receive the Guggenheim Foundation’s 2012 award. She was chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants.
“It’s a huge honor,” said Ghodsee, the college’s John S. Osterweis Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. “For someone in my field, there isn’t a lot higher up that you can go.”
For her research, there isn’t much farther away that one could go.
Ghodsee’s project deals with international women’s rights movements, with a particular focus on how organizers in communist-era Bulgaria influenced women’s rights efforts in Africa.
Through historical research over the past two years that took her to Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, Ghodsee said she began to see strong links between progressive movements there and in Africa.
“I’ve seen all of this from the Bulgarian perspective but I’m curious to see the story from the African perspective,” Ghodsee said.
The fellowship will fund, in part, trips during the next few years to Bulgaria, Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania and possibly Zimbabwe — if the political situation there is calm — Ghodsee said.
From studying the relationship of women’s movements in those countries, Ghodsee hopes to shed light on lingering effects of the Cold War that she said are not well understood.
“We understand how Cold War competition influenced technology, for instance, but we rarely think about how it influenced the global women’s movement and how tensions between Soviet bloc and western countries may have been a catalyst for greater women’s equality globally,” Ghodsee said. “So, because the socialist countries were in Africa organizing women, it may be that American women were able to push for more equality in our own country.”
Part of her research will be to tease out the distinctions between the U.S.-born feminist movement and an international push for women’s rights that she said would not necessarily identify with “feminism.”
“When we use the word ‘feminist,’ it comes with the stereotypical baggage: a 1970s idea of bra-burning and not shaving your legs,” Ghodsee said. “My research is much more interested in the global women’s movement, including those who believe in sexual equality and support for women as mothers and women as workers, but who would not call themselves feminists,” Ghodsee said.
Ghodsee said her research will likely become a series of articles and a book that could include a variety of historical fiction called ethnographic fiction, which she said helps to make the material more accessible to readers who don’t have specific academic interests in the topic.
To see a video outlining Ghodsee’s Guggenheim-winning research project, visit http://goo.gl/Sgc8o.
dfishell@timesrecord.com
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