About

Ermeline de la Croix collaborates closely with Dr. Felicity Bodenstein on the research and writing of the Digital Benin-authored provenance data. She identified over one thousand unique provenance names in the data transferred by the institutions and co-authored over fifty biographies. She linked all provenance data to the controlled vocabularies that she established for provenance names and roles on the platform. This research led to the development of the ‘Provenance’ space on the platform, which allows users to access the provenance names and linked objects. The provenance data was linked to external websites such as Wikidata, Getty vocabulary and others. Ermeline De la Croix and Felicity Bodenstein are establishing provenance research and tool development for internal and external use.

Ermeline de la Croix studied Law, Art History and Archaeology at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne University. For her research master’s degree in Heritage and Museums, she wrote a first thesis on the Iy’Ọba Idia ivory uhunmwu-ẹkuẹ kept in the British Museum. In 2021, she started working as a provenance researcher for Digital Benin with Felicity Bodenstein.

While working for the project, in 2024, her master’s second year thesis focused on the complex trajectories of the forty-seven wooden uhunmwu-elao catalogued in Digital Benin.

Now preparing her PhD at the EHESS under the co-direction of Felicity Bodenstein and Claire Bosc-Tiessé, she is interested in the larger corpus of wooden altar objects from Benin.