Salam Al Kuntar is Lecturing Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Rutgers New-Brunswick’s Department of Classics and Assistant Dean of Middle Eastern Affairs at Rutgers Global. She worked at the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) in Syria in a number of capacities from 1996-2012. Since 2012, she has been active in the field of cultural heritage preservation. Salam is a National Geographic explorer, a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum and the chair of SIMAT (Syrians for Heritage), a non-profit association for heritage preservation based in Berlin. Her research interests center on the archaeology and heritage of the Middle East exploring a wide variety of themes such as ancient economy and urbanism, forced migration, modern identity and historic narratives, conflict and iconoclasm. She has worked on heritage preservation projects with displaced communities and refugees in Turkey, Jordan and in northwest Syria.