Programme
- 16h45: Welcome
- 17h00: Presentation by Dan Hicks
- 18h00: Q&A
Abstract
What do societies choose to remember, and what forms of symbolic violence remain embedded in their monuments, museums and universities? Is that choice a democratic one?
In this event, anthropologist and curator Dan Hicks presents his latest book, Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting.
Moving between intellectual history, historical anthropology, critical museum studies and a direct, epistolary mode of address, Hicks radically traces the connections between statues commemorating colonisers and enslavers, the emergence of disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, and the accumulation of looted objects and ancestral human remains in Western museums and universities.
At the heart of the book is Hicks’s concept of “Militarist Realism”: a political, aesthetic and architectural formation through which colonial violence, white supremacy and military power became naturalised within Western visual culture and cultural institutions from the 1870s through the 1920s—and which, he argues, is now resurfacing alongside neo-imperialist warfare across the globe.
Refusing the opposition between preserving every monument and pulling them all down, Every Monument Will Fall asks who has the authority to determine whom society remembers, how public memory is constructed, and whether dismantling can become a form of redress. The book offers a poignant reflection on the monumental institutions of modernity—the university, the museum and the discipline of anthropology itself—and on the people whose lives and voices have been erased from their official narratives.
The event also forms part of the presentation of the ERC-funded research project ICONS: Exploring Global Iconoclastic Politics in the 21st Century. Led by Nataliya Tchermalykh at the Geneva Graduate Institute, and hosted by its Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism, ICONS examines the destruction and transformation of monuments and visual signs as forms of political expression, historical truth-seeking, collective identity formation and justice-making across different political contexts. Dan Hicks’s latest book provides a crucial point of departure for understanding the contemporary politics of iconoclasm - an exceptionally visible yet still under-researched feature of global politics.
Speaker
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Working across archaeology, anthropology, art, architecture, heritage and material culture, his research examines the enduring presence of colonial violence in contemporary institutions and public memory.
He is the author of The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (2020), named one of the New York Times’ Best Art Books of 2020 and winner of the National Council on Public History’s Book Award. His latest book, Every Monument Will Fall (Hutchinson Heinemann/Penguin, 2025), was selected as one of Artforum’s Best Books of 2025.