Lynn Meskell is Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences, Professor in the Department of Historic Preservation, 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.  Previously, Meskell 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. Over the past twenty five years she has been awarded grants and fellowships including those 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. She is 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 examined natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, the archaeology of figurines and burial in Neolithic Turkey and daily life in New Kingdom Egypt. 

Since 2011 Lynn 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 in the Middle East and undertaken a 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, analyzing conflict and co-operation in more than 1200 World Heritage sites, and the rise of heritage warfare and securitization from UNESCO to NATO.