Professor Mitch Lerner is the next Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. His appointment will begin on July 1, 2026, for a four-year term.

“I am pleased to announce that Professor Mitch Lerner has agreed to serve as the next Director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies,” said Ohio State College of Arts and Sciences Divisional Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Professor of Sociology Ryan King. “I am grateful to the search committee members – Dana Renga, Chris Nichols, Kyle McCray, and Kendra McSweeney – for their careful work and I would also like to thank Professor Dorry Noyes for her dedicated leadership of the Mershon Center since 2022.”

Lerner is a Professor of American diplomatic history and a longtime member of the Mershon Center community. He currently serves as Director of Ohio State’s East Asian Studies Center and as the faculty fellow for the Stamps Eminence Fellows Honors Program. Over more than two decades at Ohio State, he has held a range of interdisciplinary leadership roles and brings extensive administrative experience to this position.

Professor Lerner is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar of U.S. foreign relations, Cold War history, and international security. He is the author of The Pueblo Incident: A Spy Ship and the Failure of American Foreign Policy and has published widely in leading journals in diplomatic and security studies. He has held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair at University College-Dublin; been a Distinguished Speaker of the Asian Studies Association; served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; and is the editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. Mitch has also won Ohio State’s Alumni Association Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the President and Provost's Award for Distinguished Service. His work reflects a sustained engagement with questions of diplomacy, ideology, and global security, and he has been an active participant in Mershon programs for many years.