Lynn Meskell facts for kids

Lynn Meskell (born 1967) is an Australian archaeologist and anthropologist. She studies how people lived in the past. She also looks at how we protect old places and objects today.

Currently, she is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2020, she has been a special professor there. This means she teaches and researches across different subjects. She also works as a curator at the Penn Museum. There, she helps care for items from the Middle East and Asia.

From 2019 to 2025, she is also a visiting professor at Cornell University.

Her Education

Lynn Meskell studied at the University of Sydney in Australia. She earned her first degree in 1994. She then went to the University of Cambridge in England. There, she earned her Ph.D. in archaeology between 1994 and 1997.

For her Ph.D., she studied an ancient Egyptian village. This village was called Deir el-Medina. It was home to workers who built tombs for pharaohs during the New Kingdom of Egypt. The village was located near the Nile River, across from Luxor.

Early Work

After her Ph.D., Lynn Meskell worked at New College, Oxford from 1997 to 1999. Then, she moved to New York City. She became a professor at Columbia University in 2005.

In 2001, she started a new academic magazine. It is called the Journal of Social Archaeology.

She received special grants to support her research. In 2004, a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation helped her. This allowed her to study in South Africa. She did fieldwork in places like Kruger National Park.

Research and Career

Lynn Meskell is interested in many topics. These include how societies work and how we should protect old sites. She also studies global heritage and the ethics of archaeology. Ethics means what is right and wrong.

She is well-known for her work on feminist archaeology. This looks at how gender roles shaped ancient societies. She also focuses on how we protect world heritage sites.

Her early research looked at life in New Kingdom of Egypt. She also studied natural and cultural heritage in South Africa. She researched ancient statues and burials at a very old site in Turkey called Çatalhöyük.

Meskell has also studied UNESCO World Heritage. UNESCO is an organization that protects important places around the world. She looked at how UNESCO makes decisions. She also studied how these decisions affect different countries and local people. She used old records and interviews to understand UNESCO's work.

She has also done fieldwork in India. There, she explores how big ancient sites are protected. She also looks at how this affects the people living nearby. In 2016, she was invited to India for a special academic program.

From 2019 to 2020, she was a professor at Stanford University. Since 2020, she has been a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She works in both the College of Arts and Sciences and the Weitzman School of Design. She also helps manage collections at the Penn Museum.

Awards and Honors

Lynn Meskell is an Honorary Professor in South Africa and India. This means she is recognized for her important work there.

She has received many grants and awards for her research. These awards come from important groups like the National Science Foundation.

In 2017, she became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. This is a high honor for scholars in Australia. In the same year, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the American University of Rome in Italy.

Books She Has Written

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

Images for kids

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  The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where Lynn Meskell is a curator.

See also

In Spanish: Lynn Meskell para niños