Katherine Verdery

Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist and author,[1] currently the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, and also a published author.[2] She was also previously the Eric R. Wolf Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center of Russian and European Studies at University of Michigan, and also in 2007, the George Armitage Miller Endowment Visiting Professor at University of Minnesota. In 1995, she was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[2]

Journalist Neal Ascherson reviewed Verdery's book My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File (ISBN 9780822370819, May 2018) in the London Review of Books in July 2018.[3] Verdery spent an extended period working in Romania in the 1970s–1980s, where as a foreign visitor she was extensively surveilled by the Securitate under the Ceaușescu regime, which incorrectly suspected her of spying. After Ceaușescu's fall, she was eventually able to view her surveillance files through the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives (CNSAS). Her book describes the files' contents and her reactions to seeing them.