‘Brave and clear-sighted. Hicks opens up an extraordinary conversation between the past and the present’ Alice Roberts, bestselling author of Domination and Crypt

Throughout the past decade, public debates about colonialism have recognised the roles of monuments and museums in making an ideology of imperialism, extractivism and violence endure into the present.

In a longer-term perspective, this lecture addresses how longstanding movements for cultural restitution and the decolonisation of knowledge have sought to dismantle these structures of legacy colonialism.

Introducing the idea of 'militarist realism' as an unfinished movement of art, aesthetics and politics from the late 19th century to the present, this lecture joins the dots from colonial battlefields and human remains, through universities, culture and the arts, to Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

A collaboration between Litfest and the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (FHASS) at Lancaster University.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan is the author of The Brutish Museum: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, and has written for publications from the Guardian to The Times Literary Supplement and The Art Newspaper. @ProfDanHicks

Deborah Sutton teaches modern South Asian History at Lancaster University, focusing on the politics, custody and occupation of imperial and post-imperial devotional and urban heritage.

The Lancaster History Lecture – Dan Hicks