Lawrence Rothfield is associate professor of English and   Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where he is currently directing a major three year research initiative on illicit antiquities markets, “The Past for Sale: New Approaches to the Study of Archaeological Looting.” Former director of the Cultural Policy Center, Professor Rothfield’s heritage policy publications include two books analyzing the disastrous failure to secure Iraq’s sites and museums from looting in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion: The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (University of Chicago Press 2009); and an edited volume, Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War (Altamira, 2008). His current work focuses more broadly on conceptualizing archaeological site looting as a policy problem that could be tackled using policy tools developed to deal with analogous collective challenges.

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