March 2026: Dr. Alexis Peri (CAS/History)
Alexis Peri is an associate professor in the Department of History. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.s from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of modern Russia and Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet period. She has strong interests in the history of war, terror, intimacy and private life, women, US-Soviet relations, diaries, letters, literature in history, and environmental history. Dr. Peri was the recipient of the 2019 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, awarded by Boston University’s History Department, and of the 2024 Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, conferred by Boston University. Her work has been supported by grants from the America Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright Program, the Kennan Institute, the International Research & Exchanges Board, the American Philosophical Society, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, Phi Beta Kappa, and Boston University’s Center for the Humanities. Dr. Peri also received a 2025 CISS Summer Mini-Grant.
Peri’s first book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Pushkin House Book Prize, the 2018 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the 2018 American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) Book Prize in Cultural Studies. She is currently writing a history of Soviet beauty pageants, which flourished during the USSR’s final years, and is co-researching and co-writing an environmental history of the Crimean War (1854-1856) with Prof. Catherine Ashcraft at the University of New Hampshire’s Department of Natural Resources and Environment. Additionally, Dr. Peri is an avid writer of articles.
What made you decide to be a social scientist/why does social science matter to you?
I love stories– stories about fascinating human beings and fascinating stories that human beings tell.
Can you tell us about a recent research project that you’re excited about?
I am writing a history of the Soviet Union’s collapse and Russian Federation’s emergence through beauty pageants, which dramatized the era’s major debates about liberalization, privatization, westernization, and national separatism in glitzy, glamorous fashion. By 1990, there were some 30 pageants held in the USSR every year and many of them were really experiments through which the future of Soviet society was reimagined.
Write everyday for thirty minutes. Big projects get done through tiny steps. You just have to be consistent about it.
HI279: The Experience of Total War. This is the first class I ever created and it is one I love to reinvent and tweak and teach again and again.
I once seriously considered pursuing a career in musical theater.