Mitchell Lerner is professor of history at The Ohio State University, and director of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies. His research and teaching focus is on modern American diplomatic and political history during the Cold War, with an emphasis on U.S.-East Asian relations.

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 U.S. Naval History, and was named by the American Library Association as one of 50 "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. He is also editor of four volumes that work at the intersection of American politics and foreign policy, and author of a biography of LBJ that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. In 2026, he became editor of the Journal of American East Asian Relations. 

He has published articles about modern American politics and foreign policy in numerous anthologies and journals, including Diplomatic History, Diplomacy & Statecraft, the Journal of Military History, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Journal of East Asian Affairs; Journal of Cold War Studies, and the Journal of East Asian Relations. His op eds have appeared in media such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plains Dealer, Time Magazine, National Interest,  Japan Times, Korea Times, and the Diplomat, and he has done interviews with media in the US, Spain, England, Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Turkey, Argentina, France, India, Portugal, as well as with the AP, UPI, C-Span, NPR, ProPublica, Radio Free Asia, and the Voice of America. 

Lerner was elected to the governing council of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 2008, and was elected the president of that organization in 2023. He has served as a fellow at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, and in 2005-06 he held the Mary Ball Washington Distinguished Fulbright Chair at University College-Dublin. In 2019, he was selected to the Association of Asian Studies’ Distinguished Speakers Bureau, and also delivered the National Security Agency’s Center for Cryptologic History annual Henry Schorrek Memorial Lectures. He has received fellowships and grants from the Korea Foundation, Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library, and John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, along with multiple grants from the US Department of Education, Japan Foundation, and Korea Foundation. 

At Ohio State, Lerner has been director of both the Institute for Korean Studies and the East Asian Studies Center, as well as faculty fellow for the Eminence Fellows Honors Program. In 2006, he won the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, and in 2018, he won the Ohio Academy of History Distinguished Teacher Prize. In 2025, he won Ohio State’s Honors Distinguished Service Award, as well as Ohio State’s President and Provost Award for Distinguished Service, the university’s highest service award.