Artists, Scholars, and Spies rounds out the first year of the Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series with an exploration of the entangled histories of scholarship, research, and academia with statecraft, empire, and the infrastructures and practices of intelligence and espionage.

The seminar considers how forms of knowledge produced by artists, writers, scholars, and scientists intersect with those pursued by intelligence services, asking where their methods, ambitions, and objects of inquiry diverge, overlap, or become entangled with the logics of intelligence work itself.

At once historical and contemporary, the seminar examines how knowledge—its production, circulation, and authority—has been implicated in and mobilized by covert and overt forms of state and imperial power, while also treating these entanglements as vital subjects of artistic and scholarly inquiry. In doing so, it reflects on how such dynamics persist in the present and continue to shape the political and cultural stakes of knowledge production today.

With historian Gregory Afinogenov, author of Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power, artist Nina Hartmann, and writer and New School faculty member John Reed, author of The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm. Hosted and moderated by VLC curator Eriola Pira and artist Caitlin Cherry.

Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
Through modes of shared study, rehearsal, and iterative dialogue with invited artists, thinkers, and the public, the VLC Seminar Series develops and presents artistic and scholarly research centered on the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027, the Seminar Series is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry. Each seminar is paired with a curated reader on the Matter of Intelligence Are.na channel, grounding the dialogue and opening new paths for exploration.