Katherine Verdery earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University and comes to The Graduate Center from the University of Michigan, where she was Eric R. Wolf Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. Prior to that she spent twenty years teaching at Johns Hopkins University. She has conducted multiple field projects in Romania, investigating such themes as ethnic relations, nationalism, the transformation of socialist systems, and the changes in agricultural property relations. She is the author of The Vanishing Hectare; The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?; National Ideology Under Socialism; and Transylvanian Villagers. The recipient of numerous grants, including two from the National Science Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently at the Russell Sage Foundation, 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 past member of the American Anthropological Association's board of directors.

Photo: Paul Jaronski