Lynn Meskell

Lynn Meskell, a Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, is Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation and Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzmann School of Design, and curator in the Middle East and Asia sections at the Penn Museum. She is currently A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (2019–2025). She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Rome and Bergen and holds Honorary Professorships at Oxford University and Liverpool University in the UK, Shiv Nadar University, India and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.  The founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, Meskell has broad theoretical interests including socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. 

 

Her earlier books and publications focus on the archaeology of New Kingdom Egypt and Neolithic Turkey and natural and cultural heritage in post-apartheid South Africa. She has published on the rise atomic archaeology and the entanglements of archaeological science with American military and corporate aggrandizement in Central America, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean. Since 2011 she has conducted an institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, tracing the politics of governance and sovereignty and the subsequent implications for multilateral diplomacy, international conservation, and heritage rights. Her award-winning book A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (OUP, 2018) reveals UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. Building on this research, she has examined the entwined histories of colonialism, internationalism, espionage and archaeology in the Middle East, coupled with a new largescale survey project in Syria and Iraq to assess public opinion on heritage destruction and reconstruction. Her other fieldwork explores monumental regimes of preservation in India, conflict and co-operation in 1200 World Heritage sites, and the rise of heritage warfare and securitization from UNESCO to NATO.