Halee Robinson

I am a historian of the carceral state, race, and freedom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. My current book project, tentatively titled “‘They Taken Him Away From Us’: Race, Punishment, and the Intimate Histories of the Texas Prison System, 1865–1912” explores the intimate effects and consequences of the Texas prison system on the everyday lives of Black, Mexican, Indigenous, and poor white people after the Civil War. In particular, her project illuminates the central role that family and community played not only in the punitive aims of the state, but also in the ways that incarcerated and free people alike resisted state violence and punishment and articulated their own conceptions of justice. My research 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, and the Princeton University Center for Human Values.