Brian Goodman writes about literature, dissent, and the unexpected lives of political ideas.
He is the author of The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers Across the Iron Curtain (Harvard University Press, 2023), a transnational history of writers and dissidents during the Cold War. The book received the Pamela Jensen Award from the American Political Science Association and an honorable mention for the ASEEES USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies.
His recent work explores the literary and intellectual history of the Cold War and its aftermath, with particular interests in dissent, censorship, human rights, democracy and authoritarianism, and the ways writers and ideas move between political worlds. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Drift, American Literary History, Public Books, LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Goodman is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is affiliated with the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian & East European Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies. He holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, and before coming to ASU, he was a Postdoctoral Instructor in Human Rights at the University of Chicago. In 2025–26, he was a Budapest Open Society Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University.
Contact: bkgoodm1@asu.edu
