Dr. Sperling teaches a variety of courses in comparative politics, including Russian politics; revolution and political violence; mass murder and genocide under communism; transitions to democracy; globalization and democracy; and political science fiction. Her research interests lie mainly at the intersection of Russian politics and gender studies.

Sperling’s book, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford University Press, 2015) 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.” Sex, Politics and Putin was also included in Top 10 books on Russia for 2014. Sperling is also the author of Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Altered States: The Globalization of Accountability (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom (with Melike Sayoglu) are co-authors of Courting Gender Justice: Russia, Turkey, and the European Court of Human Rights (Oxford University Press,2019). Her most recent book, co-authored with her Clark colleague, Robert Boatright, is Trumping Politics as Usual: Masculinity, Misogyny, and the 2016 Elections (Oxford University Press, 2020). In recent years she has published articles in East European Politics and Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the International Journal of Human Rights.