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Dorit Geva is a political sociologist in the Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU. She is also a member of CEU's Democracy Institute. From 2017-2019 she was Head of Department, and in August 2019 she was appointed as the first Dean of Undergraduate Studies at CEU, where she led unprecedented changes at CEU by establishing and administering CEU's first undergraduate programs.
Geva has had an especially international career, and bridges European and North American academic communities. She is a Canadian who completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at New York University (Ph.D. supervisor: Craig Calhoun), after which she was the Vincent Wright Fellow in Comparative Politics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (2006-2007), followed by four years as a Harper Schmidt Fellow (the Society of Fellows) teaching undergraduate political and social theory within the University of Chicago's common core curriculum (2007-2011).
She joined Central European University in Autumn 2011, and was Head of Department 2017-2019. As a consequence of CEU's forced departure from Hungary to Austria, she worked intensively with several colleagues across CEU departments to create the BA in Culture, Politics, and Society. In recognition of her talents as a leader who combines attention to detail with a clear vision for innovative undergraduate education and who knows how to build trust, she was appointed to be the founding Dean of Undergraduate Studies at CEU (2019-2022), building from the ground up every administrative, academic, and curricular aspect of CEU's 3 new BA programs. Professor Geva is thus a proven change-maker, having developed and successfully implemented expanding CEU's profile from its original founding as an MA and PhD-granting institution, to a leading European university in delivering undergraduate education. This is the most significant and succesful change in mission CEU has undergone since its original founding vision.
In terms of research expertise, Professor Geva specializes in political sociology, gender and politics, comparative and qualitative methods, historical sociology, and political and social theory. Her methodological expertise is of exceptional range, including exhaustive archival research, political ethnography, interviews, and comparative methods. Most of her publications are in top-tier journals and presses.
She wrote a comparative book on the politics of military service in France and the United States, published by Cambridge University Press and since published in German by Hamburger Press. She published related journal articles in the American Journal of Sociology, Polity, Politics and Society, and various other journals. Weaving together Weberian approaches to modern state development, scholarship on American Political Development (APD) and feminist theories of patriarchal power, this corpus expands feminist theorizing on modern state power, its complex relationship to men's patriarchal power, and specifies how these forces affected establishment of military conscription systems for men. She has also published on U.S. policies on fatherhood-promotion and neoliberal welfare reform in the journal Social Politics.
In 2013 she started studying gender politics and the new radical right in Europe, with the support of a Marie Curie Grant, and a European Institute for Advanced Studies (EURIAS) grant held at the Collegium de Lyon, a French Institute for Advanced Studies. Assessing already in 2013 that European politics were moving rightwards, and under a new wave of female leaderhsip, Professor Geva's scholarship has become a central point of reference in current analyses of gender politics and the populist radical right. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, and Social Politics, where her article, "Daughter, Mother, Captain: Marine Le Pen, Gender, and Populism in the French National Front," was selected as an Editor's Choice article. Her article "Non au Gender! Moral epistemics and French conservative strategies of distinction" received an honourable mention for the 2021 Best Paper Award by the European Sociological Association.
Her most recent work examines the merger and mutual remaking of far-right and neoliberal politics, especially as articulated in contemporary Hungarian politics and the post-neoliberal state. This work has been published in Theory, Culture and Society; and with Dr. Felipe Santos she co-authored a piece in International Affairs on reforms to higher education on the part of radical right reformers in Europe. She is currently writing a book on new articulations of radical right politics in Europe, including reforms to sovereignty and to the neoliberal state, with particular attention also to the role of bourgeois actors in leading these reforms.
Professor Geva has served on prestigious award committees, such as the Hendrik Enderlein Prize jury. In addition to publication of her numerous editorials, her work has drawn media attention from around the world, and she has been invited to deliver talks at universities in Canada, Russia, United States, Israel, and throughout Europe.
Professor Geva supervises PhD and MA theses broadly focusing on political sociology, and with a specialization in gender, sexual and racial politics.
Her ORCID ID is 0000-0002-5910-3982
