Mahri Leonard-Fleckman

Biography

Mahri Leonard-Fleckman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Classics, and an affiliate of the Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program. She earned her Ph.D. and M.Phil. from New York University in Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, and her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York. She received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in Spanish and English Literature, after which she served in the Peace Corps Dominican Republic. Before transitioning to Holy Cross, Leonard-Fleckman was an Assistant Professor at the University of Scranton (2015-2016) and at Providence College (2016-2018). 

Leonard-Fleckman is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Middle East. She specializes in the history and religions of ancient Israel/Palestine, Syria, and Iraq in the first millennium BCE, a time of immense political and cultural transformations. She is particularly interested in scribal practices, methods of history writing and the dynamics of empire, including responses to empire across different cultural groups. She is author of Scribal Representations and Social Landscapes of the Iron Age Shephelah (Oxford University Press, 2025), The House of David: Between Political Formation and Literary Revision (Fortress, 2016), co-author of The Book of Ruth in the Wisdom Commentary Series (Liturgical Press, 2017), and co-editor of "A Community of Peoples" (Brill, 2022). She is currently working on a book on The Assyrian Royal Annals (under contract, Cambridge University Press).

Leonard-Fleckman is also engaged in public scholarship, and she is the author of the award-winning popular series Ponder: Contemplative Bible Study (Liturgical Press, 2022, 2021, and 2020). She is currently co-editor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series The Ancient Near Eastern World and the Bible (ANEWB), and she is active on numerous other editorial boards and professional committees.