Kirk Savage has written extensively on public monuments within the larger theoretical context of collective memory and identity. He is the author or editor of three prizewinning books. The Civil War in Art and Memory is an anthology exploring the intertwined themes of race, militarism, heroism, and domesticity. 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; 2nd edition 2018) investigated the themes of slavery and emancipation in the monument boom that followed the U.S. Civil War.  He is at work on two new book projects. Co-authored with Elizabeth Thomas, His Father’s Son: Yonaguska, Will Thomas, and the Forgotten History of Cherokee Resistance on the Appalachian Frontier, tells the story of the extraordinary Cherokee chief Yonaguska (1760-1838) and his agent and adopted son William Holland Thomas (1805-1893), and how one family descendant has come to terms with the repression and manipulation of this history.  Another project focuses on the Civil War dead in a local Pittsburgh “rural cemetery” in order to examine the much larger movement of bodies, names, and memorials in Civil War commemoration.