Alexis Peri

Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, Late Modern Europe

Alexis Peri 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. She is currently writing a history of Soviet beauty pageants, which flourished during the USSR’s final years, and she 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.

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. It also received an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History. Peri’s second book: Dear Unknown Friend: the Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women (Harvard University Press, 2024). Peri has published articles in Diplomatic History, Kritika, The Russian Review, and The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review as well as chapters in five edited volumes: Women’s Wartime Experiences, 1939-1945: Exile, Survival and Everyday Life (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2021); Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II (Indiana University Press, 2015); Chelovek i lichnost’ v istorii Rossii konets XIX-XX vek  (Nestor-Istoriia, 2013); Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); and Zhizn’ in byt’ blokirovannogo Leningrada (Nestor-Istoriia, 2010). Her work has been supported by grants from the 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.

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.