This seminar explores the destruction of monuments and sites, and how these objects and places are remembered and renewed, as communities struggle to recover and rebuild. We consider theories of the monument and memory and their significance in a globalized world, testing and expanding them through case studies from different historical moments and places. Themes include iconoclasm (Byzantine, Islamic, Protestant, revolutionary); exorcism/erasure of religious and political regimes (conversion/destruction of religious buildings; rituals of damnatio memoriae); meanings and uses of spolia; theories and aesthetics of ruins; urbicide in times of war and peace; heritage and violence in colonial and post-colonial contexts; displacement, diaspora, memory.