Mark W. Chavalas

Dr. Mark Chavalas is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where he has taught since 1989. He earned his BA at California State University-Northridge and his MA and PhD, both in History, at UCLA.

Dr. Chevalas is author or coauthor of publications including Mesopotamia and the Bible (Baker, 2002) and the IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament (InterVarsity Press, 2000) and coeditor of The Ancient Near East and Women in the Ancient Near East. Dr. Chavalas has had fellowships at Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and other universities. He has nine seasons of excavation experience at various Bronze Age sites in Syria, and he is currently President of the American Oriental Society Middle West region and a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

His research over the past decade has focused on interconnections between ancient Mesopotamia and outlying areas such as Anatolia, Iran, Egypt, and Syro-Palestine. Other recent research has investigated gender constructs in the ancient Near East and Mesopotamian historiography. Dr. Chavalas’ current research is focused on writing a history of Bronze Age Syria from the advent of writing in the third millennium BC to the Iron Age. His courses cover a wide area, including ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Syria, and Turkey; Iran before Islam; women in the ancient world; and the Akkadian and Sumerian languages.

Dr. Chavalas and his wife Kimberlee are the happy parents of six. When he is not serving in various capacities at First Evangelical Free Church in Onalaska, Wisconsin, Dr. Chavalas describes himself as “a hopeless baseball fanatic, bleeding Dodger blue.”