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Professor Dan Hicks

dan hicks
Professor of Contemporary Archaeology
+44 (0)1865 613011
dan.hicks@arch.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. Full details of his research, publications and teaching can be found at www.danhicks.uk

Dr Dan Hicks MA (Oxon), PhD, FSA, MCIfA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. Dan has held this post since 2007, and previously was a Lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. 

Working between Art, Archaeology, Heritage, Anthropology, 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. He studies human duration not just to contemplate, but to intervene with the ongoing presence of the past in our shared contemporary world.

He has held number of visiting appointments, including as a Research Fellow  at Boston University, Visiting Professor at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris (2017-18), and Senior Fellow in Politics at Freie University, Berlin. In Fall 2024 Dan will be a Distinguished Lecturer at Stanford University. Dan has received over £6m in external research grants over the years, including most recently grants from AHRC, the DFG (Germany), Open Society Foundations, Art Fund, Arts Council England, and Volkswagen Stiftung.

Dan has edited and authored nine books since 2006, until recently mainly for academic audiences – including for Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press, and Left Coast Press. In 2017 he received the Rivers Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Dan is a Fellow and former Trustee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a full Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. 

Dan's last 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, 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 book 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  Dan 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 Penguin/Cornerstone in 2025.

Full details of his research, publications and teaching can be found at www.danhicks.uk

Dan welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral students in the fields of colonialism, art, museums and heritage (broadly conceived). 

Links

Dan Hicks at St Cross College https://www.stx.ox.ac.uk/people/dan-hicks

Dan Hicks at the Pitt Rivers Museum https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-dan-hicks

Research Awards

Dan was awarded the Royal Anthropological Institute's Rivers Memorial Medal for 2017.

Links

St Cross College

Pitt Rivers Museum

Dan Hicks on Twitter

Key words: decolonisation, biocultural heritage, curation, endangered heritage, materiality, museums, policy, contemporary, post-medieval, Europe, Africa, Americas