Valerie Sperling is Professor of Political Science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her research interests lie mainly at the intersection of Russian politics and gender studies. She is the author of Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia (2000), Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability (2009), and the award-winning Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (2015). She and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom (with Melike Sayoglu) are co-authors of Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights (2019). Her most recent book, co-authored with her Clark colleague, Robert Boatright, is Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (2020). In recent years she has published articles in East European Politics and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, the International Journal of Human Rights, and Europe-Asia Studies.