Gail Kligman, PhD

Gail Kligman’s research focuses on politics, culture, and gender in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, during and after the communist period. She is the author of the cautionary tale and award-winning book about the banning of abortion, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceauşescu’s Romania (1998). Kligman also regularly taught undergraduate and graduate courses on The Politics of Reproduction and Everyday Life. Other books of hers include: the co-authored Peasants under Siege: Collectivization in Romania, 1949-1962 (2011), which won multiple awards, including the Barbara Jelavich Book Prize and the Davis Center Book Prize and the co-authored, award-winning Politics of Gender after Socialism (2000). She also authored The Wedding of the Dead (1988). Kligman is a distinguished professor in Sociology at UCLA and has held teaching positions at the University of Chicago, UC Berkeley, University of Texas at Austin, Stanford, and Georgetown. She has received numerous prestigious research grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, MacArthur Foundation, and the Soros Foundation.