Halee Robinson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor , History
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. She also has a chapter that details Black Texans' struggles against peonage and county convict labor in the early twentieth century in the forthcoming edited volume, Texas Behind Bars: Histories of Punishment and Detention in the Lone Star State (University of Texas Press, 2027).
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, Princeton University's Center for Human Values, and the University of North Texas.
Before arriving at UT San Antonio, Halee was a Postdoctoral Scholar of African American History at Penn State's Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center. She also worked as a researcher for the Center for Black Digital Research's Colored Conventions Project. She received a PhD in History and a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University, MA in History from Princeton University, and BA in History and Political Science from Vanderbilt University.
Degrees
- 2025 ,Ph.D., Department of History, Princeton University, Graduate Certificate in African American Studies
- 2021, M.A., Department of History, Princeton University
- 2019, B.A. Department of History and Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, cum laude, Highest Honors in History
Honors and Awards
2026
The Portal to Texas History Research Fellowship, University of North Texas, 2026-2027
2024
Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellowship, University Center for
Human Values, Princeton University, 2024-2025
Research Fellow, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast Region, Lamar University, 2024-2025
Quin Morton Teaching Fellowship, Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, 2024-2025 (declined)
OAH Conference Travel Award for Ph.D. Students, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
2023
Texas State Library and Archives Commission Research Fellowship in
Texas History, Texas State Historical Association and Texas State Library
and Archives Commission
Department of African American Studies Dissertation Research Funding, Princeton University
2022
William and Madeline Welder Smith Research Travel Award, Dolph
Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas
Department of History Dissertation Research Funding, Princeton
University
Department of History, Pre-Dissertation Research Funding, Princeton
University
2020
Department of African American Studies Pre-Dissertation Research
Funding, Princeton University
2019
President’s Fellowship, The Graduate School, Princeton University (2019-2021)
Dewey Grantham Award in History, Department of History, Vanderbilt University
2017
Vanderbilt Undergraduate Summer Research Program Grant, Vanderbilt
University
Publications
Book Reviews
Review of The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822-1895 by John R. Lundberg in The Western Historical Quarterly, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whag023.
Review of The Carceral City: Slavery and the Making of Mass Incarceration in New Orleans, 1803-1930 by John K. Bardes in the North Carolina Historical Review 101, no. 4 (October 2024).
Review of The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation by Lisa Biggs in the Journal of African American History 109, no. 3 (Summer 2024).
Invited Talks, Conference Presentations, and Workshops
2026 Slavery, (Un)Freedom, and the Historical Roots of Carceral Algorithms,
Tracing Carceral Algorithms Through the Past, Present, and Future: A
Symposium on Carceral Algorithms, The Pennsylvania State University,
State College, Pennsylvania
2025 “Black Texans and the Intimate Histories of Incarceration,” Keynote
Address for the Cowden History Symposium, University of Texas at San
Antonio, San Antonio, Texas
2024 “‘To Establish Law and Order Throughout the State’: The Use of
Incarceration Against Black and Indigenous People in Texas, 1871-1879,” Southern Historical Association, Kansas City, MO
“‘We will all be reduced to slavery’: Black Texans’ Experiences of State
Punishment, Migration, and Freedom in the 1870s,” Western History Association, Kansas City, MO
Panelist on Keynote Session Honoring Dr. Tera Hunter, Southern
Labor Studies Association, Chattanooga, TN
“‘Apeal to you for there sake’: Carceral Social Worlds and the
Politics of Survival and Resistance,” Western History Dissertation Workshop, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
“‘Your wife until death’: The Intimate Histories of Incarcerated People
and their Families in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century
Texas,” Organization of American Historians, New Orleans, LA
““Begged me to make this apeal to you for there sake”: Incarcerated Black Women’s Social Worlds as Resistance to the Texas Prison System, 1883-1912,” The Lemon Project Spring Symposium, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA
2023 “‘We will all be reduced to slavery’: Race and Reconstruction in the Texas
Penal System, 1865-1879,” Modern America Workshop, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
“‘Begged me to make this apeal to you for there sake’: The Role of Black Women’s Social Worlds in the Texas Prison System, 1900-1912,” African American Intellectual History Society Conference, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC (accepted, but unable to attend because of COVID)
2017 “Black Women, Myth, and the Archive in the Antebellum and Postbellum
South,” Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, TN
Public History Writings
“Convict Leasing After Slavery,” Picturing Black History, October 15, 2024. https://picturingblackhistory.org/convict-leasing/.
“Black Women’s Voices and the Archive,” Black Perspectives, November 14, 2017. https://www.aaihs.org/black-womens-voices-and-the-archive.
Works-in-Progress
Halee R. Robinson, “‘Entercede for us at once’: Poor Black Texans and the Department of Justice’s Intervention in Texas’ County Penal Systems, 1904-1912,” in Texas Behind Bars: Histories of Punishment and Detention in the Lone Star State, eds. William S. Bush and George T. Díaz (University of Texas Press, 2027).
