Katherine Verdery is the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and distinguished professor of anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 1973, she has conducted field research in Romania, initially emphasizing the political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism. Two decades after the fall of communism under the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Verdery discovered that she had been a subject of investigation. She captures this discovery in her impressive memoir, My Life As a Spy, published by Duke University Press.