Robyn d'Avignon

West Africa, nature and technology, scientific research, state formation

Robyn d’Avignon is an historian and anthropologist of West Africa, with interests in natural resource extraction, scientific research, and state formation. Her first book manuscript—Shadow Geology: The Search for Subterranean Knowledge West Africa—examines the pre-colonial and colonial roots of conflicts over mineral discovery and property rights in the context of an ongoing gold mining boom in savannah West Africa. Robyn conducted research for this project in Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and France with funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. At NYU, Robyn teaches courses on African history for all time periods, humanitarianism, decolonization, nature and technology, and on New York as an African city.

Robyn d’Avignon is on leave for the 2018-2019 academic year as a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

“A Ritual Geology: Producing Subterranean Property in Nineteenth Century Bambuk,” Technology & Culture (forthcoming)

“Primitive Techniques: From ‘Customary’ to ‘Artisanal’ Mining in French West Africa,” The Journal of African History 59.2 (2018), 179-97.

“Shelf Projects: The Political Life of Exploration Geology in Senegal,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4 (2018), 111-130.

“Minerals,” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology (Dec 2017)