Lester's research focuses on medical anthropology, gender, embodiment, religion and ritual, psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry. Linking these issues at various points is her focus on gender, self and the body. She has recently completed her first book (based on her dissertation research): an ethnography of subjective transformation through the systematic alteration of the experience of embodiment in the context of a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico. She examines the ways in which the Sisters' existential transformation proceeds in direct, practical engagement with larger cultural concerns about Mexican nationalism and cultural identity in the face of an accelerated movement into the "first world." Lester's interest in the religious experiences of women in the convent grew out of her previous (and ongoing) research on anorexia nervosa. She is particularly interested in anorexia as a contemporary ascetic practice, the way in which anorexia as an illness is defined and constructed within medical discourse, and how this, in turn, shapes the anorexic woman's subjective experience of her distress. Specifically, she interrogates the cultural dimensions of the illness as one in which particular, moralized forms of body ritual assume center stage. She also conducted research on the Lower East Side of New York City as part of a three-year, three-city project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation evaluating urgent questions of welfare, work, and identity among formerly homeless mentally ill individuals. Her particular focus was on questions of the cultural constructions of "mental illness" and "recovery" as projects of spiritual and moral regeneration. Lester's current research explores the embodied terrains of sexuality and desire in the anorexic condition. She is particularly interested in the mobilization of spiritual or religious discourses in these contexts as a means of articulating and persuading suffers to accept "permissible" experiences of the body.

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