Hermann von Hesse, an art history professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for 2024.
Von Hesse is one of 60 scholars chosen from 1,100 candidates after a rigorous, multi-stage peer evaluation process, according to an ACLS news release. The grants were offered to early-career, untenured researchers and are worth up to $60,000 for 6-12 months of continuous research and writing. The ACLS Fellowship Program encourages researchers who have the ability to make novel and important contributions to the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
The award will support von Hesse’s project “Love of Stone Houses”: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces, and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast, 1700-1890. This project broadens African and African Atlantic histories and art histories beyond the stereotypical focus on trade goods and sacred relics often associated with African material cultures (especially in the Western imagination) to include property and real estate. Fortified stone buildings housed not only ancestors and living relatives, but they also served as economic hubs, attracting local, regional, and worldwide trade.
The project investigates how Gold Coast merchant families increasingly used their sacred stone buildings and material assets to gain European credit on imported items throughout the move away from the transatlantic slave trade. These developments influenced Gã and Fante’s concepts of value, security, power, and vulnerability. This study is the first in African and African diaspora studies to historicize the house as an embodied location of overlapping ancestral and physical security, and it contributes to larger understandings of materiality that differ across African cultures and histories.
Von Hesse was already awarded a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for this study.
ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 80 scholarly groups, representing American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. The ACLS Fellowship Program is primarily sponsored by ACLS’s endowment, which has received contributions from the Mellon Foundation, the Arcadia Charitable Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS Research University Consortium, and individual benefactors.