Event Details

Each year The Lancaster History Lecture, a collaboration between Litfest and the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (FHASS) at Lancaster University, speaks to the importance of history and the humanities in understanding the world – and also in shaping the world.

Dan Hicks, 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, will give the lecture on March 18 as part of Lancaster’s literature festival, Litfest 2026.

Drawing on his controversial book, Every Monument Will Fall, which traces the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism and 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 remains, Professor Hickswill offer 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.

Read more about the lecture here.