Please join us for a lecture by Hermann von Hesse, an assistant professor of art history, titled "Love of Stone Houses: Anxious Transformations, Collateralized Ancestral Spaces and the Ambivalence of Security on the Gold Coast."
About the speaker:
Hermann von Hesse is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Illinois. His research mainly focuses on the nexus between the material cultures of the African Atlantic world, the Black Diaspora and early modern European imperial and capitalist expansion and the contemporary legacies of these historical processes. He is currently working on his first book, ‘Love of Stone Houses’: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast," which discusses the Gold Coast's global linkages, materiality, and regimes of value and debt from the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the British colonial era.