New Faculty Join Graduate Center This Fall

Four leading scholars have been appointed to The Graduate Center's faculty, effective in September: Dagmar Herzog, widely respected in the field of European history; John Torpey, an outstanding sociologist who has made important contributions to historical and political sociology; Katherine Verdery, considered the foremost specialist in East Central European Studies; and Catherine Wilson, noted for her work in the history of philosophy.

Professor Dagmar Herzog (History), named Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar, conducts transnational and comparative research on the ways in which religion and secularization have affected political and social developments in Western Europe. She comes to The Graduate Center from Michigan State University, where she gained a reputation as a fine teacher and researcher. Professor Herzog has written extensively on Holocaust memory and the history of sexuality. Among her pioneering books are Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden and Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. She also edited Sexuality and German Fascism and Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, and is currently editing Sexual Politics in Postwar Austria, a special issue of the journal Contemporary Austrian Studies. Professor Herzog earned her B.A. from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. She served as a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and is the recipient of a grant from The Ford Foundation supporting her current research.

Professor John Torpey (Sociology) previously taught in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, where he also served as Interim Director of the Institute for European Studies. Torpey has worked extensively on modern German society and history, and his book Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy is considered important in the field for the light it shed on civil rights movements and intellectual activism under communist regimes. Professor Torpey is the author of a social history of passports, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, which has been widely influential for its discussion of the role of identity documents in the rise of modern states and their control over the movements of citizens and outsiders. His most recent work, the forthcoming Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics, discusses the concept of reparations and uses of the past in contemporary politics. Torpey, who received his B.A. in Political Science from Amherst College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, previously taught at the University of California, Irvine.

Professor Katherine Verdery (Anthropology), named Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar, was the Eric R. Wolf Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan prior to her Graduate Center appointment. She also previously chaired the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins University, where she taught for twenty years. Professor Verdery is considered one of the leading anthropologists specializing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc; she is an expert on socialist and post-socialist societies and has conducted multiple field projects in Romania, investigating such themes as ethnic relations, nationalism, the transformation of socialist systems, and changes in agricultural property relations. Verdery is the author of five highly acclaimed books: The Vanishing Hectare; National Ideology under Socialism; The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?; and Transylvanian Villagers. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including two from the National Science Foundation and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; at the Russell Sage Foundation she is co-authoring a study on the collectivization of agriculture in 1950s Romania. Professor Verdery is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, serves on the executive board of the Social Science Research Council, and is a former member of the American Anthropological Association's executive board. She received her B.A. from Reed College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Professor Catherine Wilson (Philosophy), named an Andrew Heiskell Faculty Scholar, comes to The Graduate Center from the University of British Columbia, where she also served as editor of the History of Philosophy Quarterly and executive editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Professor Wilson is a leading historian of philosophy, particularly the early modern period. Her areas of particular interest are 17th-and 18th-century history and philosophy of science, moral and social theory, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy of literature. Among the important books she has authored are Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study; The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope; and Descartes's Meditations: An Introduction. Professor Wilson earned her B.A. from Yale, her B.Phil. from Oxford, and her Ph.D. from Princeton. She has also served on the faculty of the universities of Oregon and Alberta.

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Dagmar Herzog; Photo: Michael Staub

John Torpey

Katherine Verdery; Photo: Paul Jaronski

Catherine Wilson; Photo: Bayne Stanley