Professional Affiliation

Professor, Political Science, Clark University

Expert Bio

Valerie Sperling is Professor of Political Science at Clark University. Her research lies mainly at the intersection of Russian politics and gender studies. She is the author of Sex, Politics, & Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (2015), which won the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) Davis Center Book Prize for the "outstanding monograph on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology or geography," as well as the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Heldt Prize for the "Best book in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women's Studies.”  She is also co‐author of Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights (2019). Sperling’s most recent book, co‐authored with her Clark colleague, Robert Boatright, is Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (2020).