Mahri Leonard-Fleckman

Mahri Leonard-Fleckman joined the faculty in 2025, bringing expertise in the world of ancient empires and the communities that navigated their rise and fall. A scholar of the languages, literatures, and histories of ancient Israel/Palestine, Syria, and Iraq during the first millennium BCE, she is particularly interested in exploring how different cultures wrote their histories and responded to imperial power across time.

Leonard-Fleckman is the author of Scribal Representations and Social Landscapes of the Iron Age Shephelah (Oxford University Press, 2025) and The House of David: Between Political Formation and Literary Revision (Fortress, 2016). She co-authored The Book of Ruth in the Wisdom Commentary Series (Liturgical Press, 2017) and co-edited “A Community of Peoples” (Brill, 2022). Her upcoming works include The Assyrian Royal Annals (Cambridge University Press) and a study examining the import of conquest narratives for communal expression and identity-building across ancient civilizations from Egypt to Babylon.

Beyond the academy, Leonard-Fleckman connects scholarship with public engagement through her award-winning Ponder: Contemplative Bible Study series (Liturgical Press, 2020-2022). She is co-editor of W. Kohlhammer’s International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament series and Cambridge University Press’s The Ancient Near Eastern World and the Bible Elements series, in addition to serving on numerous editorial boards and professional committees.

Leonard-Fleckman earned her Ph.D. from New York University and her M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in New York. She received a B.A. in Spanish and English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, after which she served in the Peace Corps Dominican Republic. She comes to PTS from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she served as an associate professor in the Religious Studies and Classics Departments. Prior to Holy Cross, she was an assistant professor at Providence College (2016-2018) and at the University of Scranton (2015-2016).