Biography
Mark Letteney is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. He holds the Carol Thomas Professorship in Ancient History.
Mark serves as assistant director on the excavation of the Roman 6th Legion at Legio, Israel, where he directs excavations in the legionary amphitheater, and co-director of the Solomon's Pools Archaeological Project.
His monograph, The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity: Intellectual and Material Transformations, explores how imperial Christianity changed the way that scholars across disciplines made arguments in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, and the reflection of new scholastic practices in manuscripts from the Theodosian Age. Cambridge University Press published the book Open Access in October 2023. It was awarded the 2024 Lautenschläger Award, and was shortlisted for the SHARP Book History Book Prize and the AAR Award for Best First Book in the History of Religions. The book has been reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Church History, the Journal of Early Christian Studies, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, the Journal of Roman Studies, Sehepunkte, Scripta Theologica, Textual Cultures, and the Times Literary Supplement. Corrigenda are available here.
His second book, Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (co-authored with Matthew David Larsen) brings together documentary, archaeological, literary, and visual evidence to present a synthetic account of the ideology and experience of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin, from 300 BCE–600 CE. The book will be published Open Access by the University of California Press in August 2025. Corrigenda are available here.