Mitch Lerner, professor of U.S. diplomatic history with a focus on Korea and director of the East Asian Studies Center (EASC), has been named a recipient of the President and Provost’s Award for Distinguished Faculty Service. Lerner’s exceptional contributions to Ohio State span nearly 25 years across multiple disciplines, colleges and campuses, where he has brought significant support to the university to advance the study of East Asia, inspiring educators and students alike to teach, learn and engage with one of the most significant regions of the world.
He has a well-established record of service at Ohio State and at local, state and national levels, including notable leadership roles. Lerner served as associate director of EASC and head of its Institute for Korean Studies from 2011 to 2020, before becoming EASC director in 2020. He began his career at Ohio State Newark in 2000, where he directed the LeFevre Fellows honors program.
"Professor Lerner has served the university at an exceptionally high and broad level in his more than two decades at Ohio State. He embodies a remarkable dedication to serving our students, our university, and the broader academic community," said Scott Levi, chair of the Department of History. "His significant contributions and the wide range of his appointments across campuses and units testifies to the extraordinary breadth of his university-wide impact."
In the last decade, Lerner has raised the profile of EASC as a premier national institution by helping to secure approximately $8 million in Title VI grants through the U.S. Department of Education, which supported multiple programs that advanced students’ critical language skills and area studies expertise through programs, including Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships and many other workshops, conferences and events devoted to East Asia.
His work with East Asian specialists across campus has yielded a series of secondary school workshops that trained 853 teachers from 32 states and 42 counties across Ohio from 2018–22 and created 96 downloadable lesson plans for K-12 teachers that received more than 18,000 hits in the same period. He has also designed a host of new programs to equip graduate students for careers that engage with East Asia, and he directs the East Asian Studies Interdisciplinary MA program.
Under Lerner’s leadership, EASC established a recent partnership with the Freeman Foundation to support a summer internship program for students in East Asia. The Center also built a strong relationship with Spelman College in Atlanta that included the college’s first courseshare with an HBCU devoted to race and hosted the first ever “East Asia Day” for central Ohio high schools that attracted nearly 300 Ohio juniors and seniors to campus. Lerner also helped develop the annual Sijo competition that EASC hosts for K-12 students and built a partnership program with the regional campuses that supports them in numerous ways, including developing the first ever East Asian language course for a regional campus.
Over the years, Lerner has served on numerous committees, advisory boards, faculty search committees and is immediate past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), the learned society in the United States in his field. He is also a recipient of the 2005 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and is a two-time recipient of the Newark Faculty Service Award.