Two presenters who met at a 2017 conference at W&L joined forces to repatriate a stolen Nepali deity
Published Tuesday, Jul. 27, 2021, 12:00 am
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Story by Lindsey Nair
Professional conferences usually are considered a success when attendees pick up innovative ideas, do some networking or even land a plum job. But those outcomes sound mundane compared to what happened in the aftermath of a 2017 conference at Washington and Lee University.
After meeting at a conference on the ethics of acquiring cultural heritage objects in March of that year, two presenters – artist and activist Joy Lynn Davis and Erin Thompson, an art crime professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice – began a collaboration that would ultimately lead to an FBI investigation, a seizure from a Dallas museu