Robyn d'Avignon, a 2016 anthro-history graduate, publishes a book on the untold history on one of the world's oldest indigenous gold mining industries: Francophone West Africa’s orpaillage.

Avignon who is a now an Assistant Professor of African History at New York University received praise for her new book. Danny Hoffman, author of Monrovia Modern: Urban Form and Political Imagination in Liberia, called Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa an, "extraordinary project—thorough, nuanced, smart, and compelling. Robyn d’Avignon’s significant scholarly achievement offers a fresh, stimulating approach to the mutual constitution of geological knowledge."