Visting Professor
Late Modern Europe
Associate Professor of History, Boston University
Visiting Associate Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
Education
Ph.D., History, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, Late Modern Europe
Research Interests
Soviet History, Russian History, Late Modern Europe, WWII, the Cold War, terror, everyday life, gender, women's history, personal documents (diaries and letters), history and literature
Bio
Alexis Peri focuses on the history of modern Russia and Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet period. She has strong interests in the history of modern warfare, terror and terrorism, intimacy and private life, women and gender, US-Soviet relations, diaries, letters, and the importance of literature in history. Peri has published a monograph entitled The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017), which 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 has published articles in Kritika, The Russian Review, and The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review as well as chapters in the following edited volumes: Women’s Wartime Experiences, 1939-1945: Exile, Survival and Everyday Life (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, in press), 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, the Foreign Language & Area Studies Program, Boston University’s Center for the Humanities, and the Office of the Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Peri’s current research examines hundreds of pen-friendships that Soviet and American women formed during WWII, and it traces how they struggled to maintain those friendships during the Cold War and McCarthyism. The project is tentatively titled: Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discover the Power of the Personal (under contract with Harvard University Press).
Peri was the recipient of the 2019 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Prize in Undergraduate Teaching.
Representative Publications
“New Soviet Woman: The Post-World War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad,” The Russian Review, Vol. 77, no. 4 (October 2018): 621-644.
“The Art of Revision: How Vera Inber Scripted the Siege and Herself During WWII,” Kritika Vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 143-178.
“Queues, Canteens, and the Politics of Location in Diaries of the Leningrad Blockade, 1941-42,” Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II, eds. Donald Filtzer and Wendy Z. Goldman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 158-205.
“Revisiting the Past: History and Historical Memory during the Leningrad Blockade,” Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, Vol. 38, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 105–129.
“How Terrorists Learned to Map: Plots and Plotting in Boris Savinkov’s Recollections of a Terrorist & The Pale Horse,” Petersburg/Petersburg: Novel and City, 1900-1921. Coauthored with Christine Evans. ed. Olga Matich. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, 149-173.
