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 will be in conversation with Mai Musié here at bookhaus. Tickets cost £7 and include a glass of wine or a soft drink and £3 off the book. Presented by bookhaus.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.

Mai Musié is an ancient historian and a public engagement professional. She has been a key voice in the UK for engagement with the humanities for over a decade. Her research explores race and ethnicity in the ancient world; she investigates how the ‘other’ is represented in ancient Greek and Roman literary sources. Mai is passionate about exploring the interconnectivity between the ancient Mediterranean world and North-East Africa.

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