Gail Kligman

Gail Kligman

Distinguished Professor, Sociology
Department: Department of Sociology
Phone: (310) 206-7277
Email: gkligman@international.ucla.edu


Biography

Gail Kligman’s research has focused on politics, culture, and gender in Central East Europe, both during the communist period and since its demise, and includes extensive field research in Romania. She is co-author with Katherine Verdery of Peasants under Siege: Collectivization in Romania, 1949-1962 (Princeton UP, 2011), which won the 2012 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize, the Davis Center Book Prize, and the Heldt Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and received two Honorable Mentions by the American Sociological Association for Best Book in Comparative-Historical Sociology and Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship, Political Sociology Section Best Book. She is co-author with Susan Gal of The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton UP, 2000), which won the 2001 Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. She is also the author of The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu's Romania (UC Press, 1998), which also won the Heldt Prize, and of The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics and Popular Culture in Transylvania (UC Press, 1988). Kligman has held teaching appointments at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, and Georgetown University. She has received many prestigious research grants, including awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the MacArthur Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

Research Interests

Ethnographic and historical-comparative studies of politics, culture, and gender in eastern Europe, during and after communism.

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