Halee Robinson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Bicultural-Bilingual Studies/Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Contact
Bio
Halee Robinson is a social historian of race, the carceral state, and African American history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently working on her first book, They Taken Him Away From Us: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865-1912. The book explores how the Texas prison system impacted the social ties of free and incarcerated Black, ethnic Mexican, Indigenous, and white people and how these intimate encounters consequently shaped the meanings of freedom, justice, and punishment after the Civil War. In particular, her project illuminates the central role of family and community in histories of state violence.
Her work has been supported by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, Texas State Historical Association, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Lamar University’s Center for History and Culture, the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and the University of North Texas.
Before arriving at UT San Antonio, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar of African American History at Penn State's Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center. She received her PhD in History and a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University and her BA in History and Political Science from Vanderbilt University.
Research Interests
- African American History
- Incarceration
- U.S. South
- Black Women's History
Degrees
- PhD, History, Princeton University
- MA, History, Princeton University
- BA, History and Political Science, Vanderbilt University
Presentations
- Slavery, (Un)Freedom, and the Historical Roots of Carceral Algorithms (Tracing Carceral Algorithms Through the Past, Present, and Future: A Symposium on Carceral Algorithms, 2026)
- “Black Texans and the Intimate Histories of Incarceration,” (Cowden History Symposium, UTSA, 2025)
