Countering

France Desmarais is the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) Director of
Programmes and Development since 2010. As such, she develops the institution’s
partnerships and leads the organization’s Programmes department in all museum and
heritage related issues, specifically in the field of emergency preparedness and response
and ICOM’s international fight against illicit traffic in cultural goods, which includes
the Red Lists of Cultural Objects at Risk. She works closely with national governments
and international organizations to develop and enhance ICOM’s work in the protection
of cultural property around the world. In 2012, she created the only International
Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods, thanks to the financial support of the
European Commission. She is Permanent Secretary of ICOM’s Disaster Relief Task Force
for Museums (DRTF) and an active member of the International Committee of the Blue
Shield (ICBS). Prior to joining ICOM, France Desmarais has lived in the Middle East,
teaching at Lebanese University, in Central Africa as well as in Canada where she was
head of strategic development at the McCord Museum.
Monica Hanna has dedicated more than half her life to protecting and preserving the
cultural heritage of Egypt. She completed her undergraduate degree in Egyptology and
Archaeological Chemistry at the American University in Cairo and later completed her
doctorate at the University of Pisa, Italy. Her research focuses on the space, knowledge,
and identity of archaeological sites, with particular interest in the different meanings
and reflections of heritage regarding the identity of space and communities. She
has been working on a project in al-Qurna, Luxor, on the different narratives of the
multiple worlds of the Theban Necropolis and its meanings to the various stakeholders.
Dr Hanna currently documents looting in Egypt, which since the 2011 uprising has
become increasingly acute. Using social media tools to their fullest potential, Dr Hanna
created and currently maintains Egypt’s Heritage Task Force, while also contributing to
other social media platforms.
Katharyn Hanson is a Fellow with the Penn Cultural Heritage Centre at the University
of Pennsylvania Museum, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution, and a
visiting scholar at the Geospatial Technologies Project at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science. She works as an archaeologist specializing in the
protection of cultural heritage and has been involved in various archaeological fieldwork
projects for over 19 years. She has curated museum exhibits and published on damage
to archaeological sites in Iraq and Syria. Her research combines archaeology, remote
sensing, and cultural heritage policy. She also serves as the Program Director for the
Archaeological Site Preservation Program at the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of
Antiquities and Heritage in Erbil, Iraq. Dr Hanson received her Ph.D. from the University
of Chicago.
Samuel Andrew Hardy is Adjunct Faculty at the American University of Rome, an
Honorary Research Associate at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Research
Associate at the UCL Centre for Applied Archaeology. He researches the illicit trade in
antiquities; the destruction of cultural property; propaganda; the law, ethics, politics and
economics of cultural heritage labour. His work focuses on the inter-relations between
antiquities trafficking, cultural destruction and political violence in the Cyprus conflict
and the Syrian civil war; the global trade in antiquities and open data analysis.
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