Penn President Amy Gutmann and Provost Wendell Pritchett announced the appointment of Lynn Meskell as the University of Pennsylvania’s twenty-sixth Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor.

Dr. 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 and Sciences, the historic preservation program and department of city and regional planning in the Weitzman School of Design, and the Asian and Near East Sections of the Penn Museum, as a curator.

“Lynn Meskell exemplifies Penn’s commitment to bridging theory and practice and to using multidisciplinary perspectives to improve human understanding,” said President Gutmann. “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.”

Dr. Meskell was most recently Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the department of anthropology at Stanford University, where she had taught since 2005, and is the AD White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 2019 to 2025. 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) – awarded the 2019 Best Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology – reframes the politics of preservation in relation to international history and global practices of governance and sovereignty.

Dr. 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 Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the 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 PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge, following a BA with First Class Honors 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.