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 (University of Toronto Press, 2025).
My research is on the intersection of authoritarianism and dissent, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet region. I have won awards for my research in outlets such as Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and others.
I am also an award-winning teacher in comparative politics, international relations, and statistics. At the US Naval Academy, I teach electives for the departments of data science and cyber science. And my teaching that links the social sciences with Jewish Studies has been lauded by the USC Shoah Foundation, the Canadian Jewish News, and the University of Toronto.
Previously, I was a Visiting Scholar at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (2020-2022), a Presidential Data Postdoctoral Fellow at Western University (2020-2021), a 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).