Prof Dan Hicks
Research summary
Dr Dan Hicks MA (Oxon), PhD, FSA, MCIfA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan has held this joint post since 2007. He was previously a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol.
Working between Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, Heritage, Material Culture and Architecture, Dan's research, curation and writing has focused especially on the enduring nature of colonialism in the recent and contemporary world, and the use of an archaeological lens to understand early modern, modern and contemporary history.
Dan has edited and authored a range of books for a range of publishers, including for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press, and Left Coast Press. He is a Fellow and former Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA) and a full Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (MCIfA). In 2017 he received the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has held number of visiting appointments, including as Research Fellow in Archaeology and Anthropology at Boston University, Visiting Professor at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, and (in Fall 2024) Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University.
Dan's most recent book The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution was published in November 2020 with the small London-based radical publisher Pluto Press, and was named one of the New York Times Best Art Books of 2020. Reviewing it in the New York Review of Books, Coco Fusco wrote that ‘Hicks’s urgent, lucid, and brilliantly enraged book feels like a long-awaited treatise on justice.’ The Economist described the book as ‘a real gamechanger’, The Sunday Times said it was ‘destined to become an essential text’, and the Los Angeles Times called it ‘a bombshell book’. The Brutish Museums won the 2021 prize for the Best Book in Public History from the National Council on Public History, was joint winner of the Elliott P Skinner Book Award of the Association for Africanist Anthropology, and was shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Book Prize.
Dan has given many named lectures, including most recently the 2020 Schöne Lecture, Technische University, Berlin, the 2021 Strathern Lecture at the University of Cambridge, the 2021 Spence Lecture at Western University, Ontario, the 2022 Bernie Grant Lecture, the 2022 Goethe Lecture in London, the 2022 Robert K. Webb Lecture at the University of Maryland Baltimore, and the 2023 Driedger Lecture at the University of Lethbridge.
Dan has also often written for wider public readerships, especially writing about museums, monuments, universities, and art and culture more widely - for Hyperallergic, Apollo Magazine, The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Art Review, and Architectural Review. In 2023 he was the Chair of Judges for the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Book Prize.
Dan's next book Every Monument Will Fall will be published by Cornerstone in 2025.
Books
2025. Every Monument Will Fall. London: Cornerstone
2020. The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution. London: Pluto Press.
2019. Isle of Rust. (with Alex Boyd and Jonathan Meades). Edinburgh: Luath Press
2019. Lande: the Calais “Jungle” and Beyond. (with Sarah Mallet). Bristol: Bristol University Press.
2019. Archaeology and Photography: time, objectivity and archive. (edited with Lesley McFadyen). London: Bloomsbury.
2013. World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum: a characterization (edited with Alice Stevenson). Oxford: Archaeopress.
2010. The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (edited with Mary Beaudry). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2007. Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage (edited with Laura McAtackney and Graham Fairclough). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press (One World Archaeology).
2007. "The Garden of the World": an historical archaeology of eastern Caribbean sugar landscapes. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
2006. The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (edited with Mary Beaudry). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Other publications (selected)
2023. Declining Whiteness. In O. Wambu (ed.) Empire Windrush: Reflections on 75 Years & More of the Black British Experience. London: Hachette.
2023. The British Museum is an anachronism – here’s how to fix it. The Daily Telegraph
2023. The last remaining argument against restitution has now been lost. The Art Newspaper
2023. Are Museums Obsolete? Architectural Review
2022. The Risks That Lurk in Europe’s “Scramble for Decolonization”. Hyperallergic
2022. UK Welcomes Restitution, Just not Anti-Colonialism. Hyperallergic
2022. What are the next challenges for cultural restitution? The Art Newspaper
2022. Can we imagine public art beyond ‘toxic monumentality’? Art Review
2021. Glorious Memory. In H. Carr and S. Lipscombe (eds) What is History Now? London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson., pp. 114-128.
2021. Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum. Journal of British Art Studies 19.
2021. The UK has held onto the Parthenon Marbles for two centuries, but the tide is turning. Artnet
2021. Looted art must be returned - but on a case-by-case basis. The Daily Telegraph.
2021. Does George Osborne at the British Museum signal a dangerous blow to the arts? Elephant Magazine
2021. Let’s Keep Colston Falling. Art Review
2020. Fallism and Restitution. (with Nicholas Mirzoeff). New African Magazine
2020. An einem trüben Dezembermorgen. In M. Lagatz, B. Savoy and P. Sissis (eds) Beute. Berlin: Verlag Matthes & Seitz, pp. 403-405
2020. The UK Government is trying to draw museums into a fake culture war. The Guardian
2020. Why Colston had to Fall. Art Review
2020. Memory and the photological landscape. In S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. New York: Routledge, pp. 254-260.
2019. The Sarr-Savoy report - one year on. Apollo Magazine
2017. Table ronde: la matérialité des collections: formes d’archives et de pratiques (with É. Kissel, P. Peltier, C. Barthe, C. Moulherat and W. Modest). Journal Les actes de colloques du musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Issue 8.
Links
Full details of Dan's research, publications and teaching can be found at www.danhicks.uk
Dan Hicks at School of Archaeology: https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/people/hicks-dan
Dan Hicks at St Cross College: https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/people/dan-hicks
