Mitchell Lerner

Mitchell Lerner is an Associate Professor of History at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching focus is on modern American diplomatic and political history, with an emphasis on US-Korean relations, as well as general American policy in the 1960s.

Dr. Lerner's first book, The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy, was published in 2002 by the University Press of Kansas. The book won the 2002 John Lyman Book Award for the best work of US Naval History, and was named by the American Library Association as one of fifty "historically significant works" that would not have been published after the passage of Executive Order 13233. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes.

Dr. Lerner is the editor of Looking Back at LBJ, a collection of essays about the Johnson Administration published in 2005. He has published articles about modern American politics and foreign policy in numerous anthologies and journals, including Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, the Journal of Cold War Studies, and the Korean Society Quarterly. He is currently at work on a broad policy history of the Johnson Administration.

In 2005-06, he held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American History at University College-Dublin. Professor Lerner has also served as a Fellow at the University of Virgnia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, where he helped to edit a series of books regarding the Johnson presidency. He has received fellowships and grants from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, where he won the Kovler Fellowship in Foreign Intelligence in 2001. He also serves as editor of Passport: The Newsletter of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and co-directs, with Peter Hahn, the OSU Graduate Workshop Program in Diplomatic History.