RUINED: A Heritage of War from UNESCO to NATO with Lynn Meskell
May 12 @ 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM PDT
The Getty Center,
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049 United States + Google Map
Los Angeles, CA 90049 United States + Google Map
Hashima Island, part of the Meiji Industrial Sites, UNESCO World Heritage, Japan.
Photo Lynn Meskell
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Ada Louise Huxtable Lecture Hall (ALH)
3:00 PM PDT
The J. Paul Getty Research Institute invites you to a talk by Lynn Meskell, Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and Richard D. Green Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. For more information, please see the short description below.
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We find ourselves in a world of war when nations and non-state actors increasingly use the ruins of the past to leverage their legal, political, and territorial ambitions. Last month, an American President incited genocide, threatening that “a civilization will die tonight.” The nation most obsessed with the war on terror was now inciting it. In an age when everything can be weaponized, how exactly should we think about this intersection of global heritage and conflict, warfare, and geopolitics? And how does heritage operate within 21st-century warfare?