Kirk Savage

I began writing on public monuments and public space in the U.S. as a free-lance author in the early 1980s. My first publication was a piece in the West Coast literary magazine Threepenny Review on the controversy surrounding Maya Lin's design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Since then I've gotten a steady job in academia, but my passion for the subject has remained as strong as ever.

My first book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, won the John Hope Franklin Prize for best book published in American Studies in 1998. My most recent book, Monument Wars, returns to the subject of my first free-lance projects 25 years ago, Washington, D.C.

I continue to write for general audiences on why we erect monuments and what they mean to us, most recently in the Washington Post.

I am now a professor and department chair in the history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.