Dan Hicks: Monuments Will Fall

Dan Hicks joins Sadia Habib in conversation to mark the paperback release of Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting.

As part of the book’s tour, the discussion will unpack Hicks’s central arguments around the “four As” — Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture — and the “four Ms” — monuments, museums, memory and militarism. Together, Hicks and Habib will examine urgent questions of transparency and ethics surrounding the continued presence of hundreds of thousands of ancestral human remains held in legacy colonial museum collections.

The conversation will place these histories alongside the public commemoration of colonial figures in statues and memorials, opening up a wider debate about how societies choose to remember the past. The event reflects the book’s call for renewed public dialogue on what is preserved, who is memorialised, and the democratic right of communities to reshape their memory culture.