Dr. Helen Malko is an anthropological archaeologist with training in cultural heritage studies. She is the Associate Director of the Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the Near East's archaeology, the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq and its impact on local communities, including the Assyrians. Other areas of her scholarly interest include cultural representation in museums and cultural and collective memory.

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Dr. Malko received a PhD from Stony Brook University and a master’s degree from Baghdad University. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to conduct research in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, Metropolitan Museum (2012- 2014). From 2014 to 2017, Dr. Malko was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University.

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Her publications include “Heritage Wars: A Cultural Genocide in Iraq” in Cultural Genocide:

Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations, ed. Jeffrey Bachman (Routledge, 2019), a co-authored article “Parthian Rock Reliefs in Iraqi Kurdistan” in Iraq 2019, the BISI Journal, "The Kassites of Babylonia: A Re-examination of an Ethnic Identity," in Studies on the Sealand and Babylonia under the Kassites, eds. Susanne Paulus and Tim Clayden (Berlin: De Gruyter 2020), “The Assyrians of South West Asia: Modern People, Ancient Past,” in Ancient Near Eastern Empires, 2023.