February 10: Katherine Verdery, “What I Learned from My Secret Police File”

Please join us for our second meeting of the spring semester.

Katherine Verdery
Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology,
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

“Talk: “What I Learned from My Secret Police File”

Since 1973, Professor Katherine Verdery has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. With the changes of 1989, her work shifted to problems of the transformation of socialist systems, specifically the changing property relations in agriculture. From 1993 to 2000 she did fieldwork on this theme in a Transylvanian community; the resulting book, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania, was published by Cornell University Press (2003). She then completed a large collaborative project with Gail Kligman (UCLA) and a number of Romanian scholars on the opposite process, the The resulting book, Peasants Under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949–1962, was published by Princeton University Press (2011).

Professor Verdery’s most recent project takes off from her secret police file, which she received from the Romanian government in 2008.

We meet at the NYU Center for European and Mediterranean Studies,
285 Mercer Street (between Waverly and Washington), 7th floor,
4:30 p.m.–6 p.m.