Heather A. Peters has been a socio-cultural expert for the Yunnan Great Rivers Conservation and Development Action Plan Project since November of 1998, a project which is managed and supported by the Yunnan Provincial Government and The Nature Conservancy. She has also served as Cultural Consultant of the UNESCO Principal Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (PROAP) in Bangkok since June of 1997, where she formulates and oversees projects aimed at community involvement with cultural preservation, sustainable development (including tourism), survival of indigenous peoples, and the trafficking of girls and women. Principle project sites include: Lijiang and the Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China; and Luang Namtha and Luang Prabang, Laos.

From February of 1996 to June of 1997, Peters served as Chief Technical Advisor for LEAP, UNESCO, and PROAP, where she oversaw the formulation of projects aimed at strengthening community involvement with cultural heritage preservation. In the spring of 1995, Peters worked as a consultant for UNESCO, PROAP, where she gave a series of museology workshops in Hue, Vietnam and Lahore, Pakistan. From September of 1993 to June 1994, Peters was a consultant in the UNESCO Cambodia office, where her responsibilities included teaching at the University of Fine Arts in Phonom Penh and consulting on the role of responsible tourism in the context of heritage preservation. From January 1991 to June of 1993, Peters was Senior Consultant to the AMS Foundation for the Arts, Sciences and Humanties to supervise the final phase of the construction of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University. From 1981 to 1991, she taught Chinese archaeology and anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and was Keeper of the Asian Collections at the Asian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Peters has conducted research on the impact of tourism on indigenous communities in Northern Laos, and is currently investigating the impact of tourism on Northwest Yunnan. She has also researched the trafficking of minority girls and women from Yunnan, Burma and Laos into Thailand for sex work, in conjunction with Dr. David Feingold, Director of Ophidian Research Institute. Peters has researched girls’s and women’s education policies and implementation mechanisms in Laos, the role of museums in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the adjustment of refugee from Southeast Asia to Philadelphia, the Tai Yue communities living in Xishuangbanna in Yunnan, China, and the Chu state and culture in Eastern Zhou period of China. Her research has been supported by UNESCO, The John D.and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the U.S, Department of Health and Human Services, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China, and the East Asian Prize Fellow, Yale University.

Peters earned her B.A. in Oriental Studies from Barnard College at Columbia University, her M.A. in Chinese Art and Archaeology from Princeton University, and both her M.Ph. in Anthropology and Ph.D. in Anthropology with specialization in China from Yale University.

Papers by Heather Peters