The interested public often hears or reads about damage or destruction impacting cultural heritage on a global scale – colossal images of the Buddha, vast ancient cemeteries, entire Roman cities – but rarely has access to comprehensive, in-depth discussions about the issues involved. This event will provide an opportunity to hear and participate in an informed and globally oriented discussion by scholars who have direct and personal experience or knowledge of specific events, and share a deep concern for the preservation and security of cultural heritages everywhere – ancient, medieval, and recent. The coverage provided is selective, but illustrates a wide range of regions including West Africa, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The panel will also explore the ways in which cultural heritages can be fostered by national institutions and communities, as well as international support and participation. 

About the speakers:

David O'Connor
David O'Connor is Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the IFA, and was previously a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Curator-in-Charge of the rich Egyptian collection of its University Museum. He is also an archaeologist, and has directed excavation and conservation projects at the major Egyptian site of Abydos. Early in his career, he participated in the international campaign to excavate and save the archaeology and monuments of Nubia. 

Matthew Adams 
Matthew Adams is a Senior Research Scholar at the IFA and Associate Director and Field Director of the North Abydos Project of the IFA in southern Egypt. Dr. Adams is an authority on ancient Egyptian urbanism. As an archaeologist, he has worked in several Near Eastern countries. He has also conducted major excavations at Abydos, and is supervising the on-going conservation and stabilization of the largest early royal monument to survive in Egypt.

Zainab Bahrani 
Zainab Bahrani is the Edith Porada Professor of Art History at Columbia University. She has written widely on the destruction of the cultural heritage of Iraq in the popular press. In the summer of 2004 she was Senior Advisor to Iraq's Ministry of Culture. During that time she conducted a survey of war damage at the archaeological site of Babylon and instigated the state of Iraq's official request for the removal of the military base from the site. She is currently directing her new fieldwork project, Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments, a project that documents and conducts on site condition checks of the monuments, historical architecture and carved rock reliefs of Iraq, from ancient to modern.

Sarah Brett-Smith
Sarah Brett-Smith is Associate Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She specializes in African art from the Bamana (Bambara) of Mali. Her new book, The Silence of the Women: Bamama Mud Cloths, explores the mud-dyed textiles painted by Bamana women, describing how textiles function to enable the communication of truths that cannot be spoken openly. It will be out at the end of August from Five Continents Press. The Silence of the Women completes the project to explore the Bamana arts from both sides of the gender divide begun in an earlier book, The Making of Bamana Sculpture: Creativity and Gender, Cambridge University Press, 1994. The Making of Bamana Sculpture won the Arnold J. Rubin Award for the most outstanding book on African Art, 1993, awarded by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, and an Honorable Mention for the 1995 Victor Turner Prize, awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. A third book, The Artfulness of M'Fa Jigi: An Interview with Nyamaton Diarra(University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), documents the process of interviewing an elder about the origins of art, and an important article on women's knowledge, "The knowledge of Women," in Anthropologies of Art, ed. Mariët Westermann, Clark Studies in the Visual Arts (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2004), 143-16 appeared in 2005. 

Finbarr Barry Flood
Finbarr Barry Flood is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities at the IFA and Department of Art History, NYU. He publishes on Islamic architectural history and historiography, cross-cultural dimensions of Islamic art, image theory, technologies of representation, and Orientalism. Recent books include Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter, (2009), awarded the 2011 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for Asian Studies, and Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century (2011), co-edited with Nebahat AvcıoÄŸlu. His current book project, which will be published by Reaktion Books, London, is provisionally entitled Islam and Image: Polemics, Theology and Modernity.

Laurie Rush
Laurie Rush is an anthropologist and archaeologist who has served as a US Army archaeologist for over fifteen years managing Cultural Resources at Fort Drum, NY. Dr. Rush was the military liaison for return of the Mesopotamian City of Ur to the Iraqi People in the spring of 2009. She has also represented US Central Command at numerous military engagements in the Middle East including an Environmental Shura in Kabul, and analyzed cultural property protection lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghan conflicts for the Central Command Environmental Program. Educational materials developed by her team in partnership with Colorado State University have reached over 125,000 US military personnel and are also being used by UNESCO, the Associated National Committees of the Blue Shield, and the Austrian Defence Academy. Dr. Rush is the editor of the volume "Archaeology, Cultural Property, and the Military" and author of a series of articles on protecting heritage in crisis areas for both military and academic audiences. Her work has recently been featured in the media for her role as a modern "Monuments Woman".

Eman Zidan
Eman H. Zidan holds a degree in Archaeological Conservation from Cairo University, Faculty of Archaeology, Restoration and Conservation Department. She has been working as an object conservator at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo since 2008. Eman Zidan has participated in archaeological excavations in Egypt, including Abydos. She is engaged in outreach as the Founder of the World Wide Archaeology Association as well as Manager and Director of Archaeology Times online magazine. She is currently a visiting student at the IFA's Conservation Center and is working on a project funded by ARCE entitledEnvironmental conditions and long-term preservation of the collection at the Egyptian Museum – advanced training in preventive conservation. 

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