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From the article: “von Hesse’s project, ‘Love of Stone Houses: Urban Merchants, Ancestral Spaces and Sacred Objects on Africa’s Gold Coast, 1700-1890,’ broadens African and African Atlantic histories and art histories beyond their stereotypical focus on trade goods and sacred relics often associated with African material cultures toward property and real estate.
“This research is the first in African and African diaspora studies to historicize the house as an embodied space of overlapping ancestral and physical security and advances broader understandings of materiality that varied across African cultures and pasts.”
Read more in the News Bureau article, Two Illinois professors awarded NEH fellowships.