Yovanna Pineda
Dr. Yovanna Pineda is an Associate Professor of History and author of Industrial Development in a Frontier Economy: The Industrialization of Argentina, 1890-1930 (Stanford, 2009). Her upcoming book, Sensational Machines: Technē-Culture in Argentina, examines the ritual and myth-making in the design, maintenance, and repair of harvesters and tractors. Drawing on ethnographic methods, archival sources, oral histories, rumor, social media, and material culture, this transdisciplinary work charts the genealogy of technological culture in Argentina. It analyzes the 200-year development of peoples’ emotional and sensory meanings of cutting-edge technology during the long 19th-20th centuries.
Dr. Pineda directs the Middle Passage Experience, an interactive VR/AR simulation of the transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas during the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. This collaborative projects involves faculty and students across disciplines: History, Africana Studies, Games and Interactive Media, Digital Humanities, and Computer Science.
Sensational Machines: Technē-Culture in Argentina
Pineda’s second book, Sensational Machines: Technē-Culture in Argentina, examines the ritual and myth-making in the design, maintenance, and repair of harvesters and tractors. Drawing on ethnographic methods, archival sources, oral histories, rumor, social media, and material culture, this transdisciplinary work charts the genealogy of technological culture in Argentina. It analyzes the 200-year development of peoples’ emotional and sensory meanings of cutting-edge technology during the long 19th-20th centuries.