Penn has joined four other universities in the US, Canada, and the Kurdistan region of Iraq in a new academic collaboration with the World Monuments Fund (WMF), a leading organization in global heritage. WMF experts have partnered with local communities, funders, and governments to preserve more than 700 sites in 112 countries using the highest international standards.
The collaboration is made possible by WMF’s new Suzanne Deal Booth Institute for Heritage Preservation, which brings together the organization’s training programs, academic collaborations, research agenda, and professional networks under a single framework, advancing new initiatives that promote workforce development, greenspace stewardship, and digital preservation. The Institute was established in 2025 to work with its academic partners to integrate education with active preservation projects, enabling students at Penn to participate directly in fieldwork, research, and project development across the organization’s global portfolio.
“We are honored to be working with WMF and building on a years-long relationship,” says Randy Mason, professor and chair of historic preservation at the Weitzman School. “The Suzanne Deal Booth Institute will help create so many research and educational opportunities. Professor Meskell’s international work, our department’s varied research tracks, and the global ambitions of our students and graduates make this partnership a very natural fit.”
Lynn Meskell, the Richard D. Green University Professor in the departments of historic preservation and city and regional planning, has worked extensively with WMF, serving as the chair of its 2025 World Monuments Watch Selection Panel after participating as an expert panelist in 2023. (Every two years, WMF selects 25 irreplaceable cultural heritage sites facing major challenges to safeguard.) Her substantial research on postcolonial preservation and archeological ethics has taken her to many of the sites that WMF is working with communities to preserve. “I’ve seen their Watch projects in action and spoken with their local partners and communities,” Meskell says. “It makes all the difference. Their community focus is exemplary, and their priorities are those that Penn shares.”
The institutional alignment is reflected in the Department of Historic Preservation’s ongoing commitment to numerous sites highlighted by WMF over the last 30 years. Faculty, students, and staff have worked to preserve sites ranging from the Nakashima House in nearby Bucks County to Herculaneum, Italy, and the historic city of George Town, Malaysia.
“I have always admired the courage and commitment of WMF in supporting those working at sites affected by conflict, whether in Palestine, Ukraine, Iraq, Cambodia, or Kashmir,” Meskell says. Her work in Iraq and Syria following the Islamic State’s targeted campaign against heritage sites, surveying locals to see if international organizations were meeting community needs, and Mason’s work in Rwanda, working with communities to memorialize the victims and survivors of the genocide, are two further examples of the alignment between WMF and Penn.
Meskell expects the complex challenges facing preservationists to grow. “This collaboration is needed now more than ever,” she says.
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