Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope in the fragments of the past.

Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums — including the one in which he is a curator.

Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford — revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Dan Hicks is Curator and Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His new book Every Monument Will Fall has been called by Professor Paul Gilroy as “an extraordinary intervention — this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource”

Panellists:

Nandini Chatterjee (Professor of Indian History at Oxford University)
Simukai Chigudu (Associate Professor of African Politics at Oxford University)
Christopher Morton (Deputy Director and Head of Curatorial, Research and Teaching at the Pitt Rivers Museum)
Corinne Fowler (Professor of Colonialism and Heritage in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester)

The event will be chaired by:

John Schofield (Professor of Archaeology and Director Of Studies in Cultural Heritage Management at the University of York). He was formerly an Inspector and Head of Military Programmes at English Heritage. His most recent book is Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice.