Megan Leight
Megan Leight received her MA in Art History and Critical Museum Studies from the State University at Buffalo, specializing in ancient Greek art, and her MPhil in Anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. She earned a BA in Art History from West Virginia University focusing on Roman art and architecture. Her doctoral dissertation explores Mesoamerican ritual, Maya belief, and ancient trade at the Pre-Columbian site of Salinas de los Nueve Cerros in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.
She teaches courses in the visual arts of the Pre-Columbian Americas, Greek and Roman art and architecture, and early European art history. She also offers global survey courses incorporating artistic practices of Oceania, North America, Asia and Africa, increasing student exposure to diverse cultures and contemporary issues. Her experiences in the arts and humanities led to her work as a field archaeologist with a mission dedicated to heritage preservation and community development. Her academic background in the social sciences informs her pedagogy, teaching the history of art from a variety of cultural perspectives and incorporating experiences with art, preservation, and collections management into the classroom. She has extensive experience in hybrid course development implementing interactive learning strategies and engaging communication methods. She is a faculty mentor in the Research Apprenticeship Program at WVU facilitating students’ work on both national and international projects.
She is a contributing author and volume co-editor for the forthcoming volume, Living Between Worlds: The Archaeology of the Northern Transversal Strip (University of Alabama Press 2021). Her fieldwork and laboratory analyses are published annually with the Guatemalan Instituto de Antropología e Historia de Guatemala (IDAEH), and she is a regular presenter at the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) annual conference as well as the Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala. She is also an active member in the Council for West Virginia Archaeology (CWVA) and serves as a volunteer for fielding questions about state archaeological discoveries.