Hermann von Hesse

African and African Diaspora History and Art History

Early Modern global and European imperial history

Material Culture and Architectural History

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison (African History with Art History), 2021

MPhil, University of Ghana, Legon (African History), 2015

B.A, University of Ghana, Legon (History and Political Science), 2011

My 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. I’ve done archival and/or field research in Ghana, Denmark, Brazil and the United States. I am an interdisciplinary scholar. My research and training  straddles the disciplines of African history, art history, architectural history and anthropology. I am an affiliate of the Center for African Studies.

I’m currently working on my first book project, ‘Love of Stone Houses’: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast. This book is somewhat autobiographical and was inspired by the fact that I partially grew up in eighteenth and nineteenth century stone houses in Osu, a historic Gã town  which hosted the Danish-Norwegian Christiansborg Castle. This castle also doubled as the headquarters of that country’s slaving establishment on the southeastern Gold Coast.

My book 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. At the end of the legal slave trade, European commercial establishments demanded stone houses and material goods rather than captives as collateral for foreign imports that Gold Coast merchants obtained on credit. But houses were inalienable spaces of ancestral burials, family memory and material accumulation. By subjecting their houses to the market, African merchants gained greater access to European credit, but risked losing their family heritage. Consequently, Gold Coast families began to contest which measure of security, protection and power was more important – monetary wealth through real estate or family/ancestral wealth and heritage. Despite this inequity in global trade,  Gold Coast merchants contributed to the expansion of capitalism and market oriented value systems.