Alexis Peri

MEMBER-AT-LARGE CANDIDATE

Alexis Peri is an associate professor of history at Boston University, and a historian of the Russian empire and Soviet Union, with publications spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peri’s methodologies have encompassed environmental history, literary studies, women’s and gender studies, and comparative history. Her two books, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard, 2017) and Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence of American and Soviet Women (Harvard, 2024), won several prizes in the U.S. and abroad, including by ASEEES, AATSEEL, the Pushkin House, and the Organization of American Historians. She has also won two teaching awards. But the challenges she has faced have helped prepare her to serve the ASEEES community as much as her successes have. In the past few years, she was the target of a politically-motivated campaign in Russia to undermine her scholarship; she directed graduate studies at a time when the PhD program underwent major cuts; and she helped her department navigate a major university-wide labor dispute. These experiences have made her more resourceful and more empathetic.  

She has been a member of ASEEES since 2006 and has served on its dissertation prize committee, convention program committee, and in its mentoring program. As an ASEEES member at large, she will prioritize the interests of our most vulnerable colleagues, including those caught in the crossfire of Russia’s war on Ukraine, those in precarious employment, and those marginalized in academia because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, nationality, religion, or lack of elite affiliation. ASEEES and its members are facing incredible challenges coming from home and abroad. She will continue efforts to make ASEEES an inclusive and impactful organization, one that promotes top-notch scholarship and provides a base of support for scholars as people, recognizing all the real-world challenges that academia tends to eschew.