Helen Malko

Columbia University

Heritage Wars: The Erasure of History in Iraq and Syria

2016-2017: Fall

Co-sponsored by the “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments” project (Columbia University)

Helen Malko is a Research Associate at the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She received a PhD in archaeology and anthropology from Stony Brook University, and a Master’s degree in archaeology of the Ancient Near East from Baghdad University. She holds a diploma in Historic Preservation from Rutgers University. Her current research is focused on the ongoing deliberate destruction of monuments and historical landscapes in Iraq and Syria, and the related changes in the rhetoric of heritage studies and archaeological ethics that have accompanied this destruction. In particular, she is analyzing the renewed ideologies of preservation and rescue that have revived paradigms of the nineteenth century archaeology. Other areas of her research and scholarly interest include the understanding of cultural interaction in antiquity, ideas of historical consciousness, and antiquarianism in Mesopotamia. Helen has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Turkey and Iraq, and is currently the content manager for the website of the Columbia project “Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments".

Web page: https://columbia.academia.edu/HelenMalk