Mark Lester is the Assistant Director of the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies. He is the operational lead of the Center and works with the faculty director and board to plan and manage Greenberg Center programs, Jewish Studies curriculum, visiting professorships, and budgets.
Mark is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible with a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University. His research focuses on the dynamic relationship between writing and ritual in ancient Judah and its neighbors in the Iron Age Levant, Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia. He is the author of Deuteronomy and the Material Transmission of Tradition (Brill, 2024), which seeks to reconstruct ancient attitudes towards writing reflected in Deuteronomy. It argues that Deuteronomy adapts the media aesthetics of Iron Age treaties and monuments to an ancient Hebrew narrative. This book received the 2025 Biblical Archaeology Society Publication Award for "Best Book Related to the Hebrew Bible," the 2025 Manfred Lautenschläger Award for Theological Promise, and an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Book History Book Award from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publication.
Mark previously served as an instructor in the Department of Theology at Loyola University Chicago.