Professor Dan Hicks FSA, FRAI, MCIfA
Professor of Contemporary Archaeology and Curator of World Archaeology, School of Archaeology and Pitt Rivers Museum
Professor Hicks FSA, FRAI, MCIfA is an award-winning writer. He is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology, University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.
Academic profiles
Other social media
About
Professor Dan Hicks specialises in the material and visual culture of the modern and contemporary world. He has published widely on world archaeology and museum anthropology, including on world culture, the politics of heritage, landscape archaeology and the refugee 'crisis'. Current work includes questions of cultural restitution and postcolonial perspectives on museums. Professor Hicks also worked on a major exhibition on the material culture of the refugee 'crisis' at the Calais 'Jungle', held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2019.
Expertise
- Museums
- Restitution
- Culture War
- Monuments
- Public memory
- Legacies of colonialism
- National heritage
- Historic built environment
- Modern material culture
- 19th-20th century and contemporary architecture
- Contemporary art
Selected publications
Media experience
Professor Hicks has a range of experience in broadcast media, including programmes such as In Our Time, Today, Making History (BBC Radio 4) and various BBC documentaries. He has also written for a range of publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, The Art Newspaper, Museum iD and The Independent.
Recent media work
- BBC Headliners with Nihal Arthanayake (2025)
- What Isn't at the V&A Storehouse? (Art Review 2025)
- Militarist Realism (lecture at Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome 2025)
- Denkmäler überdenken, Unbenannte benennen (Jacobin Magazin 2025)
- The British Museum is an Anachronism: here's how to fix it (The Daily Telegraph 2023)
- Are Museums Obsolete? (Architectural Review 2023)
- The last remaining argument against restitution has now been lost (The Art Newspaper 2023)
- The UK government is trying to draw museums into a fake culture war (The Guardian 2020)
Podcasts
- Every Monument Will Fall: Talking with Dan Hicks About the Present’s Responsibility to Itself (Speaking Out of Place Podcast, Stanford University, 2025)
- Every Monument Will Fall (Empire Lines Podcast live in Oxford's Common Ground, 2025)
- George Pitt-Rivers with Dan Hicks (This Guy Sucked Podcast, 2025)
- Every Monument Will Fall with Dr Dan Hicks. A chat about culture and memory (Archaeology with Flint Dibble Podcast, 2025)