Alexis M. Lerner
Welcome! I am an assistant professor of Political Science at the US Naval Academy and the author of Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (forthcoming in 2024).
My research is on the intersection of authoritarianism and dissent, with a focus on the post-Soviet region. I am also an award-winning teacher in comparative politics, international relations, and statistics. In both my teaching and my research, I am committed to interdisciplinary frameworks, methodological pluralism, and data literacy.
Previously, I was a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, a Presidential Data Postdoctoral Fellow at Western University (2020-2021), Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Harriman Institute (2017-2019), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2016-2017), and the Director of Research for the Stanford University US-Russia Forum. I earned my PhD from the Department of Political Science and at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto (2020).
My work appears in Comparative Political Studies, Holocaust Studies, The Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Genocide, The Arctic Review of Law, and Politics, and The Journal of Jewish Thought. My book, Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in the Streets, is forthcoming with University of Toronto Press.