Research Interests
African and African Diaspora History and Art History
Early Modern global and European imperial history
Material Culture and Architectural History
Research Description
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.
Education
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
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design
Assistant Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Assistant Professor, Program in Medieval Studies
External Links
Work in Progress
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.
Recent Publications
von Hesse, H. W. (2024). More Than an Intermediary: James Bannerman and Colonial Space-Making on the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast‡. African Studies Review, 67(2), 396-415. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2024.20
Von Hesse, H. W. (2023). 'A Modest, but Peculiar Style': Self-Fashioning, Atlantic Commerce, and the Culture of Adornment on the Urban Gold Coast. Journal of African History, 64(2), 269-291. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853723000294
Osei-Tutu, J. K., & von Hesse, H. W. (2019). Cosmopolitan Conundrums: Impacts of Trade Fortresses on the Gã Space, 1450–1870: Impacts of trade fortresses on the GÃ space, 1450–1870. In J. K. Osei-Tutu (Ed.), Forts, Castles and Society in West Africa: Gold Coast and Dahomey, 1450-1960 (pp. 203-242). (African History; Vol. 7). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004380172_010
Osei-Tutu, J. K., & Von Hesse, H. W. (2018). Illusions of Grandeur and Protection: Perceptions and (Mis)Representations of the Defensive Efficacy of European-Built Fortifications on the Gold Coast, Seventeenth–Early Nineteenth Centuries. In J. K. Osei-Tutu, & V. E. Smith (Eds.), Shadows of Empire in West Africa (pp. 137-167). (African Histories and Modernities). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39282-0_5
von Hesse, H. W., & Yarak, L. W. (2018). A Tale of Two "Returnee" Communities in the Gold Coast and Ghana: Accra's Tabon and Elmina's Ex-Soldiers, 1830s to the Present: Accra’s tabon and elmina’s ex-soldiers, 1830s to the present. International Journal of African Historical Studies, 51(2), 197-217. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45176437