Lynn Meskell

Meskell received her B.A. from the University of Sydney in 1994 (First Class) and University Medal. She was awarded the Kings College scholarship from the University of Cambridge for her Ph.D. in Archaeology (1994-1997). In her doctoral dissertation, Meskell analyzed data from the settlement and cemeteries of Deir el-Medina, a New Kingdom worker’s village across the Nile from Luxor.[2] From 1997-1999 she held the Salvesen Junior Research Fellowship at New College, University of Oxford before accepting a position in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University in New York City where she became Professor in 2005.

Meskell is currently University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously she was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is Honorary Professor in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and in the Center for Archaeology, Heritage & Museum Studies, Shiv Nadar University, India (2) In 1999 she founded the Journal of Social Archaeology. Meskell’s interests include socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. She is recognized for her contributions to feminist archaeology, archaeological ethics, and issues of heritage. Her earlier research examined social life in New Kingdom Egypt, natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, and the archaeology of figurines and burial at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey. In 2002, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School for American Research (now the School for Advanced Research) in Santa Fe. Meskell received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship in 2004, supporting training in ethnography and African studies to prepare her for work in South Africa.[3] She carried out fieldwork in the Kruger National Park and Mapungubwe National Park.

Meskell has since 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. Institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage[4] Employing archival and ethnographic analysis, she has revealed UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage.[5] In other fieldwork across India she explores monumental regimes of research and preservation around World Heritage sites and how diverse actors and agencies address the needs of living communities. In 2016 she was invited to India through the Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) program.

Meskell was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2017. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the American University of Rome, Italy in 2017. In 2019 she was named A.D. White Professor-at-large at Cornell University. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, the American Academy in Rome, the School of American Research, Oxford University and Cambridge University. In 2019 her book entitled A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace, published by Oxford University Press, won the Society for American Archaeology Book Prize.

• 2018 A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage and the Dream of Peace, Oxford University Press: New York.
• 2015 Global Heritage: A Reader, (editor) Blackwell: Oxford.
• 2012 The Nature of Heritage: The New South Africa, Blackwell: Oxford.
• 2009 Cosmopolitan Archaeologies, (editor) Duke University Press: Durham.
• 2005 Archaeologies of Materiality, (editor) Blackwell: Oxford.
• 2005 Embedding Ethics, (edited with Peter Pels) Berg: Oxford.
• 2004 Object Worlds in Ancient Egypt: Material Biographies Past and Present, Berg: Oxford.
• 2004 Companion to Social Archaeology, (edited with Robert Preucel) Blackwell: Oxford.
• 2003 Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Maya and Egyptian Experience, (authored with Rosemary Joyce) Routledge: London.
• 2002 Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt, Princeton University Press: Princeton.
• 1999 Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Etcetera in Ancient Egypt, Social Archaeology Series. Blackwell: Oxford.
• 1998 Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, (editor) Routledge: London.