Alexis Peri

Alexis Peri is a historian and associate professor at Boston University. Her work focuses on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, The War Within:  Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017), won the 2018 Pushkin House Book Prize, awarded for the best non-fiction writing on Russia in the English Language. Her second book, Dear Unknown Friend: the Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women (Harvard University Press, 2024), received an Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ Mary Nickliss Prize in 2025. She is currently writing a history of Soviet Beauty Pageants and is co-researching and co-writing an environmental history of the Crimean War.