Dr. Alexis Lerner

Dr. Alexis M. Lerner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the United States Naval Academy. Her research is on the intersection of authoritarianism and dissent, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet region. Dr. Lerner is also an award-winning teacher of international relations, comparative politics, and statistics. In both her teaching and research, Dr. Lerner is committed to interdisciplinary frameworks, methodological pluralism, and data literacy.

Dr. Lerner's book manuscript, titled Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in the Streets (under advance contract with University of Toronto Press), demonstrates that street art is a viable tool for political communication, and effective in circumventing autocratic censorship. Post-Soviet Graffiti culminates Dr. Lerner’s ten-year ethnographic study of political street art across the post-Soviet and post-Communist Europe regions. An article-length version of this book, published by Comparative Political Studies in 2021, uses spatial mapping to evidence the Kremlin’s co-optation of subversive channels and actors. 

Dr. Lerner is also a scholar of the Holocaust. Her teaching on this subject has been lauded by the USC Shoah Foundation, the Canadian Jewish News, and the University of Toronto. Dr. Lerner's research on the Holocaust has been published by Holocaust Studies (2021) and the Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (2022). 

Prior to the USNA, Dr. Lerner was a Presidential Data Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Ontario (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 (2016-2018). 

Dr. Lerner holds weekly EI in Building 105, Room 234 on Tuesdays from 1900-2000. Email ALerner@usna.edu to make an appointment.