Lynn Meskell has been named the University of Pennsylvania’s 26th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor.
The announcement was made today by President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett.
Meskell, a world-renowned archaeologist, is the Richard D. Green University Professor, with joint appointments in the Department of Anthropology of the School of Arts & Sciences, the graduate program in Historic Preservation and the Department of City and Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design, and the Penn Museum as a curator in both the Asian and Near East sections.
“Lynn Meskell exemplifies Penn’s commitment to bridging theory and practice and to using multidisciplinary perspectives to improve human understanding,” Gutmann said. “Her work as an internationally preeminent archaeologist and anthropologist has helped explain and document the development of civilizations across Africa and Eurasia. She has also harnessed this fieldwork to improve the frameworks that scholars use to model human culture and to strengthen the important work of museums in bringing this knowledge to communities around the world.”
Meskell was most recently the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, where she taught since 2005, and is an AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Born in Australia, she has done pioneering archaeological work across the world, including research into Neolithic Turkey and New Kingdom Egypt. Her most current work explores World Heritage sites in India, especially how heritage bureaucracies interact with the needs of living communities and the implications of archaeological research for wider contemporary challenges of heritage, national sovereignty, and multilateral diplomacy. Her landmark institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (Oxford University Press, 2018), which earned the 2019 Best Popular Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology, rereads the politics of preservation in relation to international history and global practices of governance and sovereignty.
Meskell served for six years as director of the Stanford Archaeology Center, is the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archaeology, and has published a dozen books, which explore the connections between archaeological research and a wide range of contemporary areas including ethics, class, feminist theory, and postcolonialism. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Australian Research Council, and the American Academy in Rome, among many others, and is an honorary professor at the University of Oxford, the University of Liverpool, Shiv Nadar University, and the University of the Witwatersrand. She earned a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Cambridge, following a B.A. with First Class Honours from the University of Sydney, and began her academic career at Columbia University, where she taught from 1999 to 2005, following a two-year Salvesen Research Fellowship at New College of Oxford University.
“Lynn Meskell is one of the world’s most innovative and influential archaeological scholars,” Pritchett said. “In her exciting work, the past comes alive to illuminate the present, spanning issues from feminism and postcolonialism to conservation, diplomacy, and peace. Her work at Penn will reflect her extraordinary interdisciplinary scope at our world-leading Penn Museum and in academic programs across archaeology, city planning, and historic preservation.”
The Penn Integrates Knowledge program was launched by Gutmann in 2005 as a University-wide initiative to recruit exceptional faculty members whose research and teaching exemplify the integration of knowledge across disciplines and who are appointed in at least two Schools at Penn.
The Richard D. Green University Professorship is a gift of the late Richard D. Green, a 1952 graduate of the Wharton School.
