Kirk Savage Public Art Tour
Kirk Savage has written extensively on public monuments within the larger theoretical context of collective memory and identity. He is the author of two prizewinning books. Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (2009) reconsidered the key public monuments and spaces of the capital within a narrative of nation building, spatial conquest, ecological destructiveness, and psychological trauma. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997) investigated the themes of slavery and emancipation in the monument boom that followed the U.S. Civil War. He is at work on a new book about the Civil War dead that examines the interaction of bodies, names, and memorials. The project will have a digital humanities component as well, which focuses on the movement of the war dead through local and national space and the visualization of that mobile identity in the ground of a soldier cemetery.
