Prof. Dan Hicks
Prof. Hicks will be joining us to give his lecture titled ‘Militarist Realism: Some thoughts on heritage, memory and material culture.’
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His publications include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Press 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Instagram: @ProfDanHicks.
Dr. Eva van Roekel
Eva van Roekel is assistant professor at the Department of Social and cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is editor of the Dutch anthropological journal Etnofoor, member of the advisory board of the Dutch Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation and co-editor of the journal Anthropology and Humanism. In 2020, her monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press) received the international award Outstanding Academic Title 2020. Van Roekel’s work is defined by violence, morality, human rights, and natural resources in Latin America, which she approaches as an anthropologist with a multidisciplinary perspective in philosophy and the arts. As an independent filmmaker, van Roekel explores the practice of visual ethnography by theorising and working together with other independent filmmakers.
Prof. Ernst van Alphen
Ernst van Alphen is professor emeritus of Literary Studies at Leiden University. Before he was Queen Beatrix Professor of Dutch Studies at UC Berkeley. His publications include: Seven Logics of Sculpture. Encountering Objects Through the Senses (Valiz 2023), Productive Archiving. Artistic Strategies, Future Memories, Fluid Identities. (Ed. Valiz 2023), Shame and Masculinity (ed. Valiz 2021), Failed Images: Photography and Its Counter-Practices. (Valiz 2018), Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in Times of New Media. (2014), Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought. (2005), Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self. (1992), Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. (1997).
During the conference, Prof. Ernst van Alphen will be engaging in conversation with curator and visual artist Marjan Teeuwen.
Marjan Teeuwen
Marjan Teeuwen is curator and visual artist. Central to Teeuwen’s work on her Destroyed House – series are large-scale architectural buildings that are subsequently demolished. In her series of installations titled The Destroyed House, the constructive force of building and the force of construction go hand in hand: the polarity of construction and destruction representing chaos as an essence of human existence. Though the installations are artistically autonomous, Teeuwen’s work engages with the historical, political and social context of its geographical location, ensuring a mutual reinforcement between the installation and its context. See Marjan Teeuwen’s website for more information on her work.
