Olivia DrakeLaura Ann Twagira, assistant professor of history, is the author of an article titled, "‘Robot Farmers’ and Cosmopolitan Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali), 1945–68," published in the November issue of Gender & History, Volume 26, Issue 3, pages 459-477. In 1956, Administrator Ancian, a French government official, suggested in a confidential report that one of the most ambitious agricultural schemes in French West Africa, the Office du Niger, had been misguided in its planning to produce only a ‘robot farmer’. The robot metaphor was drawn from the intense association between the project and technology. However, it was…
Laura Ann Twagira, assistant professor of history, received the 2013 ICOHTEC Young Scholar Book Prize from the International Committee for the History of Technology. The ICOHTEC is interested in the history of technology, focusing on technological development as well as its relationship to science, society, economy, culture and the environment. Twagira was honored for her Rutgers University dissertation on the study of women’s development of food technology in early 20th century colonial west Africa, Women and Gender at the Office du Niger (Mali). "Twagira’s dissertation successfully characterizes and contextualizes the technological gestalt of a mundane and routine, but absolutely necessary…