Gerald Creed

(Ph D CUNY, 1992; Prof) political economy, rural identity, nationalism, community, family, ritual; Eastern Europe

Gerald Creed is a specialist on political economy, ritual and identity in Eastern Europe. He has been conducting research in rural Bulgaria since 1987. His first project examined the impact of collectivization, socialist agrarian reforms and subsequent privatization efforts on village and household economies. This long-term research is synthesized in his book Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (Penn State Press, 1998), which won the 1998 Book Award from the Bulgarian Studies Association. He recently completed another long-term project entitled Masquerade and Postsocialism: Ritual and Cultural Dispossession in Bulgaria (Indiana University Press, 2010), which uses ancient fertility rites still popular in Bulgaria to challenge standard orthodoxies of postsocialist studies. He has also edited two important volumes. The first was a collaborative project with English Professor Barbara Ching on rural identity and the politics of place cross-culturally, entitled Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy (Routledge, 1997). He subsequently organized an Advanced Seminar for the School of American Research (SAR) examining the concept of community, again from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives, the results of which were published as The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries (SAR Press, 2006). Prof. Creed is currently the Executive Officer [chair] of the Anthropology Program at the Graduate Center.

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