Madison Leeson is a cultural historian and digital humanities scholar whose work explores the intersection of heritage, politics, and technology in the Middle East. With a PhD in Archaeology and History of Art, she specialises in tracing the movement and transformation of cultural objects across empires, institutions, and digital infrastructures. Her research combines deep archival work with computational analysis to examine how artifacts, manuscripts, and monuments have become entangled in modern-day conflicts over identity, belonging, and historical legitimacy. She focuses particularly on Iraq and Ottoman successor states, considering how nineteenth- and twentieth-century intercommunal dynamics shaped the governance of material culture, and how these legacies are mobilised today in both cultural preservation and heritage destruction. Her work has also explored the role of intergovernmental agencies, particularly UNESCO, in supporting the development and exploitation of World Heritage and archaeological landscapes.

Her current work centres on the documentation and analysis of looted cultural goods, particularly from Eastern Europe. Drawing on scraped data from official registries, museum records, and police reports, she uses methods such as social network analysis to map connections between stolen artifacts, institutions, and individuals. Some of her most recent research has focused on Ukraine, where she and her colleagues at the Venice-based Centre for Cultural Heritage Technology conducted a social network analysis of oligarchs and politically exposed persons involved in the circulation of cultural goods in Ukraine and Russia. This work investigates systemic vulnerabilities in cultural heritage protection and seeks to uncover risk pathways that enable the trafficking of cultural property.

Madison’s research is driven by a commitment to methodological transparency and open access. She has built custom web scrapers and data transformation pipelines to harvest and structure heritage data from public archives, databases of cultural goods, and government registries. Her code facilitates the conversion of web data into structured formats such as CSV and GEXF, enabling large-scale graphical and statistical analyses.

Her forthcoming book explores the spatial, social, and devotional networks of early modern Iraq. It draws from Ottoman archival sources and provincial manuscripts to trace how communities negotiated spiritual authority, material patronage, and sectarian boundaries. Beyond this, she has published on topics ranging from conservation politics and manuscript trafficking to the ethics of digital heritage representation. Madison has also contributed to investigative journalism, public history, and digital curation. As former Research Team Manager at the US-based nonprofit newsroom WhoWhatWhy, she directed long-form reporting projects on authoritarianism, surveillance, and influence operations. These experiences inform her ongoing interest in the intersection of power, media, and cultural production. Her work increasingly investigates how philanthropic sponsorship of museums, especially by politically exposed individuals, can serve as a tool for reputation laundering and soft power projection.

Outside the academy, Madison is the moderator of the subreddit r/Cuneiform, a large online community devoted to the ancient Mesopotamian writing system. She has developed educational resources and reporting protocols to discourage the trade in unprovenanced antiquities and promote responsible engagement with ancient heritage online.

Developing her skills with French, Italian, Ottoman Turkish, and Arabic, Madison works across geographic and linguistic boundaries. She regularly collaborates with scholars, coders, and heritage professionals from across Europe and the Middle East. Whether working with manuscripts in Istanbul, stolen object registries in Bucharest, or archaeological data from Baghdad, she brings a cross-disciplinary and justice-oriented approach to the study of cultural heritage. Madison is also committed to decolonising heritage scholarship and often writes and speaks on the implications of labels such as “Middle East,” “Levant,” and “Islamic world” in academic and policy discourse. Her work bridges history and digital methods, advocating for thoughtful, critical engagement with both the past and the tools we use to study it.