Madison Leeson is a Researcher and Ph.D. Candidate of Cultural Heritage Management at Koç University in Istanbul. Her research focuses on the intersection of heritage management with conflict and social engineering in the 20th century Middle East and North Africa, focusing on Iraq. Her doctoral research considers local and state-level projects of heritage management in the Ottoman Empire and Iraq from the turn of the 20th century, focusing on how these campaigns articulated the ambitions of foreign, imperial powers as well as the goals of the rising Iraqi state.

She is currently conducting research on the Mandate period and the wars of the 1980s and 1990s, based on archival material from Britain, the United States, Iraq, and UNESCO.  Leeson is also interested in museum studies and the role of objects in the manifestation of power. She was previously involved with the Aeschylus Museum of Eleusis, Greece, which was proposed as a collections-free ‘institution of the Muses.’ She has also consulted on antiquities protection policy and institutional strategies to prevent the illicit trade in antiquities. She has presented research at conferences in Canada, the United States, and Vietnam, and worked in museums in Canada, Greece, and Turkey. 

In 2019, she received her MA from the University of Kent and MSc from the Athens University of Economics and Business in a dual-degree Heritage Management program. Prior to this, she studied her BFA in Museum Studies at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada, where she received the Canadian Federation of University Women’s Hope Scholarship.