Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Dan Hicks' new book Every Monument Will Fall: A Prehistory of the Culture War 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 – such as the one at which Hicks is curator. Part history, part biography and 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 the enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism, and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions.

Every Monument Will Fall reexamines 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 a 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. 

This is Dan Hicks’ second event at Pushkin House, following on from the conversation The Roots of Brutishness, which launched the Discourse programme curated by Denis Maksimov. 

Dr Dan Hicks is a Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, a Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He is the author of eight books and has written articles, essays and op-eds for various journals, magazines and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.

Bryan Knight is a Broadcast Journalist and Oral Historian based in London. He hosts Tell A Friend, an online show featuring in-depth profile interviews with political figures and entertainment personalities.

Dr Alyce Mahon is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in the dynamic between the body and the body politic in modern and contemporary art, photography, film and exhibition practice – from Dada, Surrealism and Sixties counterculture to contemporary feminist and performance art.

Swedenborg Hall, Barter St, London WC1A 2TH 

Afterwards, please join us for a reception at Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square London WC1A 2TA