The Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, will give the 2026 Lancaster History Lecture, it was announced today.

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.

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.

The inaugural lecture was given in 2024 by Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the World, and in 2025 the speaker was Helen Castor, author of The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV.

Bill Swainson, a Trustee of Litfest, said: “We are delighted that Dan Hicks will give the 2026 Lecture and speak to the theme of how we remember the past and the way in which history shapes our lives.”

Dr Michael Brown, the Discipline Lead in History at Lancaster University, said: “Dan Hicks has been a powerful voice in shaping public debates about memory, material culture, and the legacy of our colonial past, and we are delighted to welcome him to Lancaster to talk about these vital issues in what promises to be a challenging and thought-provoking lecture.”

Professor Hicks has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, cultural memory, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present.

He has authored and edited eight books, and has written for a wide variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph to The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Architectural Review and The Art Newspaper.

Lecture Moderator will be Professor Deborah Sutton who teaches modern South Asian History at Lancaster University and has worked on the politics, custody and occupation of imperial and post-imperial devotional and urban heritage. Her work on architectural history in Delhi and Odisha is concerned with the ways in which informal inhabitations challenged and sometimes changed the official designation of ‘monuments’.