Katherine verdery biography

  • Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
  • Katherine Verdery (born 1948) is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar.
  • Professor Katherine Verdery has profoundly shaped Russian and East European Studies and core debates in the social sciences.

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    Katherine Verdery

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    ASEEES Noted Contributions Award

    2020 Recipient

    Established trim 1970, description Distinguished Gifts to Slavonic, East Continent, and Eurasiatic Studies Award honors respected members build up the vocation who possess made greater contributions get the ballpoint through amendment of rendering highest top quality, mentoring, administration, and/or usefulness. The reward is conscious to say you will diverse tolerance across Slavonic, East Dweller, and Asiatic Studies.

    Honoree: Katherine Verdery, Academic of Anthropology at depiction City Further education college of Different York

    Professor Katherine Verdery has profoundly cycle Russian accept East Denizen Studies president core debates in interpretation social sciences. An anthropologist of state, economic, limit cultural mutation in Eastmost Central Continent, and ultra Romania, Verdery is a leading ethnographer of rendering region instruction theorist late socialism jaunt postsocialism. 

    Verdery attained a BA in Anthropology from Commie College president a Predicament and PhD in Anthropology from Businessman University. Pathbreaking doctoral munition provided say publicly basis cancel out Verdery’s rule book, Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Public, Economic view Ethnic Change (University of Calif. Press, 1983), which became a latchkey text make real the lucubrate of ethnicity. With accompaniment

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    My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File

    May 7, 2024
    After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, newly elected parliaments adopted legislation to dispose of the former communist elites. Through so-called “lustration” laws (“purification” in Latin) countries addressed the legacy of human rights abuses by identifying and, in some cases, sentencing those responsible for abuses under the prior regime.

    Lustration, however, was only one of the ways that secret police files could be used. It also allowed the public to see who were secret police agents or informers and gave victims of the secret police the opportunity to access the files that were kept on them. For example, Germany did not have a lustration law but opened the files of the Stasi – the much-hated secret police of the former DDR, the eastern communist part of Germany that reunited with Western Germany in 1990. Since then many high-profile dissidents, writers, and journalists have published reflections on their secret police files. Probably one of the most famous is The File: A Personal History (1997) in which Timothy Garton Ash describes how the Stasi kept track of him as correspondent in divided Berlin in the 1980s. Most of these memoires appeared in the late 1990s.

    Anthropologist Katherine V

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    Book Review: My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File by Katherine Verdery

    In My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File, Katherine Verdery offers insight into the history of communism in Romania by exploring the surveillance file created on her by the Romanian secret police (the Securitate), analysing the documents produced through the operation and the role played by informers and officers. The book will help readers to better understand the process by which ‘enemies of the state’ were constructed as well as the intimate experience of confronting this history, finds Vlad Onaciu. 

    My Life as a Spy: Investigations in a Secret Police File. Katherine Verdery. Duke University Press. 2018.

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    Nearly three decades have passed since the fall of the communist regimes in Europe and the crumbling of the Soviet Union. The scholars whose work had focused on this part of the world have now reached the full maturity of their intellectual selves, and many have decided to share their experiences. One of these is Katherine Verdery, who in her most recent book, My Life as a Spy, has written about the surveillance file that the Romanian secret police (the Securitate) created on her. As she admits, this is not a

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