Penn professor and archaeologist Lynn Meskell will be the 26th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. (Photo by Julie Hitchcock)
Penn named world-renowned archaeologist and professor Lynn Meskell as the 26th Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor on Wednesday.
Meskell currently serves as the Richard D. Green University Professor and holds joint appointments in the Weitzman School of Design’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation and the Department of City and Regional Planning the Department of Anthropology in the School of Arts and Sciences. She is also a curator in Asian and Near East Sections of the Penn Museum, Penn Today reported.
Penn President Amy Gutmann launched the Penn Integrates Knowledge Program in 2005 in an effort to acknowledge faculty members whose research integrates various disciplines of knowledge.
“Lynn Meskell exemplifies Penn’s commitment to bridging theory and practice and to using multidisciplinary perspectives to improve human understanding," Gutmann told Penn Today.
Before coming to Penn, Meskell served as the director of the Stanford Archaeology Center at Stanford University for six years. More recently, Meskell has been the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford, and is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University until 2025.
She is also the founding editor of the Journal of Social Archeology, which covers social approaches in archaeology, such as queer theory and behavioral science.
In 2018, Meskell published an ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage titled "A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace." The book examines historical preservation and heritage rights and received the 2019 Best Popular Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology, Penn Today reported.
“Lynn Meskell is one of the world’s most innovative and influential archaeological scholars," Provost Wendell Pritchett told Penn Today. "In her exciting work, the past comes alive to illuminate the present, spanning issues from feminism and post-colonialism to conservation, diplomacy, and peace."
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