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\u2019s 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\u2019s Department of Natural Resources and Environment.<\/p>\n
Peri\u2019s first book, The War Within:\u00a0 Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad\u00a0<\/em>(Harvard University Press,\u00a0<\/em>2017),\u00a0<\/em>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\u2019s second book is Dear Unknown Friend: the Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women<\/em> (Harvard University Press, 2024), which has received an Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians\u2019 Mary Nickliss Prize in 2025. Peri has published articles\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0Diplomatic History,<\/em> Kritika<\/em>,\u00a0The Russian Review,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review\u00a0<\/em>as well as chapters\u00a0<\/em>in five edited volumes:\u00a0Women\u2019s Wartime Experiences, 1939-1945: Exile, Survival and Everyday Life<\/em>\u00a0(Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2021);\u00a0Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II<\/em>\u00a0(Indiana University Press, 2015);\u00a0Chelovek i lichnost\u2019 v istorii Rossii konets XIX-XX vek<\/em>\u00a0 (Nestor-Istoriia, 2013);\u00a0Petersburg\/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921<\/em>\u00a0(University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); and\u00a0Zhizn\u2019 in byt\u2019 blokirovannogo Leningrada<\/em>\u00a0(Nestor-Istoriia, 2010). 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\u2019s Center for the Humanities.<\/p>\n Peri was the recipient of the 2019 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Prize for Undergraduate Teaching, awarded by Boston University\u2019s History Department, and of the 2024 Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, conferred by Boston University.<\/p>\n Peri\u2019s courses include:<\/p>\n\n