Michelle Fabiani is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven. She is an interdisciplinary scholar that studies patterns of behavior in international and transnational crime with a focus on cultural heritage and cultural property crimes. In her largest project to date, Dr. Fabiani combined criminological theory as a framework for examining how contextual factors influence the beginning of the illicit antiquities supply chain – archaeological looting. It proposes a methodology for understanding which sites are most likely to be looted and in which contexts using spatiotemporal data from Lower Egypt in 2015 to 2017.

Her current work focuses on developing the tools, methods, and data to mitigate and prevent crime as a means of capacity building. Recently, Dr. Fabiani became the co-director of the Cultural Resilience Informatics and Analysis (CURIA) Lab. Dr. Fabiani’s research findings have been published in Global Crime, Arts, and Collections: A Journal for Museum Professionals, among others. She is also a co-organizer of the Transatlantic Cultural Property Crime Symposium and editor of the conference proceedings.