I work as an Assistant Professor of History at New York University, where I am also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies.

I am a historian and anthropologist of West Africa. My long-term research is based in agrarian communities of Pular and Maninka speakers in the Kédougou region of southeastern Senegal. I also work in Guinea, Mali, and France. I draw on oral history, ethnography, and archives of states, corporations, and families to understand the historical antecedents of contemporary conflicts over the region’s minerals, cultivable land, plants, and forests. I am also interested in how different West African societies understand and philosophize about the natural world and about the past.

You can read about my first book, A Ritual Geology, here and other research here.

I received my Ph.D. from the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. While there, I also completed graduate training in Science & Technology Studies. My research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Michigan, and New York University. In 2020, I was a visiting scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and in 2018-2018, I was a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

You can reach me at robyn.davignon (at) nyu.edu. You can also find me on Academia.edu.