💥what an amazing launch for the paperback edition of Every Monument Will Fall at Birmingham University with @theheathbookshop tonight! It was amazing to see the beautiful paperback edition in real life for the first time.
✨Thank you @profcorinnefowler for the wonderful conversation, brilliant to do this in the Arts lecture theatre, next door to the new blue plaque for Stuart Hall, without whose work out understanding of culture would not be what ot is today 🙏
Next week -talks in Oxford, Manchester and London, links in my bio 💫
“Why did the British Museum remove references to Palestine?” — new in @newlinesmagazine /reportage/why-did-the-british-museum-remove-references-to-palestine/ or link in my bio
We are very excited to co-host this event with our lovely neighbours East Bristol Books on Tuesday 6pm.
Dont sit waiting, few tickets left. Tickets on @ebb_bristol bio.
Dan Hicks' new work tears through the polished facades of museums and monuments to expose a grimy world of colonial loot, skull collections, and academic gatekeeping. Alongside ancient historian Mai Musié, he discusses how we frame – and how we can reframe – our material culture and heritage
*Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting* compares the memorialisation of colonisers and enslavers in statues and monuments with the treatment of human remains in museums and universities, and makes the case for the democratic right of societies and communities to re-shape their memory culture, defining who is remembered, and why, and how.
Bios:
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. His books include *The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution* (Pluto Press 2020) and *Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting* (Penguin 2025).
Instagram/Bluesky: @ProfDanHicks
Website:
Incredible evening with @profdanhicks and @sarahsteinlubrano on Thursday!
Thank you so much to these wonderful authors and to everyone who came out for this great discussion from the experts themselves 🤩🤩
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#books #bookstagram #waterstones #waterstonestrafalgarsquare #event
💥 it’s been such an intense and truly brilliant three successive days of the paperback book tour, in Oxford, Manchester and London, so I don’t know about you but I am definitely up for the weekend
🙏 thank you so much to all the amazing people who showed up, asked questions, offered answers, and in so many different ways contributed to building communities around museums, monuments, memory — and anti-militarism.
🔥 @drsadiahabib just sent me some snaps of our Manchester event and the amazing reading by @zainabsaidsummat — so here are those pics; but thank you so so much also London, Oxford, and Birmingham last week too. A special thanks to @paulaakpan , to @profcorinnefowler and to @sarahsteinlubrano for those conversations and also to the wonderful @esme.ward.90 —And just to underline, @zainabsaidsummat your poetry was amazing ✨🙏
✨ really looking forward to our Bristol gig at @ebb_bristol on Tuesday 19 May with the amazing @maimusie
💫 still bored? all links to books, talks, audio etc are in my bio 💫💫🔥🔥💯
A pleasure to finally meet Dan Hicks after engaging with his work for so long. He brought intellectual rigour, political clarity, and real generosity to our event yesterday evening (especially in his engagement with the research and poetry I shared with him, and his thoughtful gesture of bringing postcards for the audience).
We always receive such generous feedback from those who join our Manchester Institute of Education (MIE) Anti-Racist Seminars. It is encouraging to hear people travel from far and wide regularly for our seminars and value the interdisciplinary nature of our events, and our commitment to bringing leading and new engaged voices into the room. Conversations with attendees after the sessions are always fun!
Invite Dan to your cultural and education spaces to share his new book, Every Monument Will Fall, a powerful intervention, urging us to rethink the imperial histories embedded in public space and how they shape our shared cultural inheritance, pushing us to reconsider what, and who, we choose to remember.
I was glad of the opportunity to share my Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity research developed with the Museum Young Collective in 2020 where we explored statues of empire and colonialism and their place in our civic landscapes. Creating space for young people to interpret and respond to these legacies in their own voices is necessary, especially where their voices are often absent.
We gifted Dan the Collective’s zine, a creative and critical reflection of their work!
What a joy to see Zainab, a former Young Collective member (now at National Museums Scotland), who had attended a fantastic conference at Manchester Museum earlier in the day, and was a good sport when I spontaneously signed her up to read poetry from the zine and of course she did so beautifully!
Huge thanks to Dan, our 60+ engaged attendees, my brilliant museum colleagues, especially Lowell, Esme, and Ciaron,our SEED EDI colleague Laura Winter for ongoing support, and to Ümit Kemal Yıldız, Miguel Antonio Lim, Nuha and Sudip for capturing the evening with ace photos.
💥Thank you Manchester!
what an amazing #everymonumentwillfall conversation this evening with the incredible @drsadiahabib introduced by @mcrmuseum director @esme.ward.90 — with a truly brilliant crowd 🔥🔥🔥
New piece in @guardian asking why the British Museum is erasing Palestine, and referring to some of the work we have been doing with @palestine_in_uk to try to stop this erasure. 🏺🇵🇸
(Note the near total lack of response from the museum: if this decision had anything to do with historical accuracy, wouldn’t you expect a museum to be able to talk about history?!)
