Professor Lynn Meskell FBA

Summary

Lynn Meskell is Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is Richard D. Green Professor in Anthropology, Professor in Historic Preservation at the Weitzman School of Design, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at Penn Museum.

In 2019 she was named A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Meskell has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Rome and Bergen and holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University, Liverpool University, Shiv Nadar in India, and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Previously, she was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

An archaeologist by training, she studied at the University of Sydney and University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on the archaeology of Egypt and Turkey; heritage violence in South Africa, India and the Middle East; the histories of colonialism, Cold War conflicts and espionage; and politics and ethics. Meskell is the founding editor of the 'Journal of Social Archaeology'.

An authority on UNESCO World Heritage, her award-winning book 'A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace' reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. Her current fieldwork and writing explore the escalation of heritage warfare worldwide and the rise in securitization from UNESCO to NATO.