Meskell received her B.A. from the University of Sydney in 1994 and University Medal. She was awarded the Kings College scholarship from the University of Cambridge for her Ph.D. in Archaeology. In her doctoral dissertation, Meskell analyzed data from the settlement and cemeteries of Deir el-Medina, a New Kingdom worker’s village across the Nile from Luxor. From 1997-1999 she held the Salvesen Junior Research Fellowship at New College, University of Oxford before accepting a position in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University in New York City where she became Professor in 2005. Meskell is currently University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously she was the Shirley and Leonard Ely Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is Honorary Professor in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and in the Center for Archaeology, Heritage & Museum Studies, Shiv Nadar University, India In 1999 she founded the Journal of Social Archaeology. Meskell’s interests include socio-politics, archaeological ethics, global heritage, materiality, as well as feminist and postcolonial theory. She is recognized for her contributions to feminist archaeology, archaeological ethics, and issues of heritage. Her earlier research examined social life in New Kingdom Egypt, natural and cultural heritage in South Africa, and the archaeology of figurines and burial at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey. In 2002, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the School for American Research in Santa Fe. Meskell received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship in 2004, supporting training in ethnography and African studies to prepare her for work in South Africa. She carried out fieldwork in the Kruger National Park and Mapungubwe National Park. Meskell has since 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. Institutional ethnography of UNESCO World Heritage Employing archival and ethnographic analysis, she has revealed UNESCO’s early forays into a one-world archaeology and its later commitments to global heritage. In other fieldwork across India she explores monumental regimes of research and preservation around World Heritage sites and how diverse actors and agencies address the needs of living communities. In 2016 she was invited to India through the program.
