Virtual Homecoming Lightbulb Café: Everyday Utopia featuring Kristen Ghodsee

Would you like to be in a book group with fellow alums from around the world, reading works by Penn Arts & Sciences faculty? Hit the books and get ready to join us for the Penn Arts & Sciences Virtual Lightbulb Café: Faculty Book Series! Our fabulous faculty authors will discuss their new books, describing the inspiration and research behind each, and answer audience questions.

The Global Discovery Series joins the Penn Arts & Sciences Virtual Lightbulb Café faculty book series in a discussion with Kristen Ghodsee, Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies, about her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Ghodsee’s latest book is a tour through 2,000 years of audacious utopian thinking and experiments, with a trip around the world to explore places that reimagine how we might live our daily lives, from Danish cohousing communities to matriarchal Colombian ecovillages to Chinese micro districts. Everyday Utopia offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more contented and connected societies, alongside a practical guide to what we all can do in the meantime to live the good life each and every day. 

Moderated by

Juliet Alekseyeva, Assistant Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies  

About the Author

Kristen R. Ghodsee is an award-winning author and Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies. Her articles and essays have been translated into over 25 languages and have appeared in publications such as Dissent, Foreign Affairs, Jacobin, The Baffler, The New Republic, The Lancet, 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 and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. In 2021, she published Taking Stock of the Shock: Social Impacts of the 1989 Revolutions, co-authored with Mitchell A. Orenstein, Professor of Russian and East European Studies.  

To read an excerpt from Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, click here.  

The Virtual Homecoming Lightbulb Café - Faculty Book Edition is generously funded by the Adolf and Felicia Leon Fund., which supports Penn Arts & Sciences programming and lecture series.