Mitchell Lerner, PhD, professor of history, has been elected as vice president/president-elect of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). One of the most prestigious professional societies in the history profession and the world’s leading organization for scholars of American foreign relations, SHAFR is dedicated to the scholarly study of the history of American foreign relations and promotes the study, advancement and dissemination of a knowledge of American engagement with the world. Lerner takes office on Nov. 1 and will serve a one-year term as vice president before ascending to the presidency in November 2023.
At Ohio State, Lerner is an experienced administrator and educator. He served as director of the Institute for Korean Studies (IKS) from 2012-2020 and is now director of the East Asian Studies Center (EASC). He is also a faculty associate at Ohio State’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, a Distinguished Scholar of the Association for Asian Studies, and the associate editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. For his work in the classroom, he has won both the Ohio State Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Ohio Academy of History's Distinguished Teacher Award. He has also trained numerous MA and PhD graduate students in both history and the interdisciplinary East Asian Studies MA program.
Lerner is one of the nation’s leading experts on U.S.-Korean relations. His first book, a study of U.S.-Korean relations in the 1960s, won the John Lyman Book Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Since the book’s publication in 2004, he has authored nearly 20 journal articles and three edited volumes. He is also a regular public commentator on this topic, with op-eds in such venues as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Korea Times, Cleveland Plains Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, The Diplomat and The National Interest, and appearances on television, radio and newspapers across the globe.
Lerner has been a fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, served on the governing council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and is on the advisory board of the North Korea International Documentation Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. He has also held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair at University College-Dublin. He received his PhD from the University of Texas-Austin.
