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.