Marco Robinson is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for Race and Justice at Exploring Black History in Texas: Connecting Archival, Oral and Digital Methodologies Black Texans have a rich and vibrant history that spans from colonial times to the present. Dr. Marco Robinson’s current research that explores the experiences of Black Texans in slavery and freedom. This presentation will explore the ways Robinson’s research merges technology and the humanities together to interrogate our history and to provide innovative ways of addressing our lack of understanding around problematic topics like slavery. His current project on the Alta Vista Plantation (formally owned by Jared Kirby and now the home of Prairie View A&M University) Digital Project is an interdisciplinary project that utilizes 3D and virtual technology to recreate the physical environments that enslaved people existed in at the Kirby Plantation. Coupled with the oral interviews from the descendants of the former plantation owners and archival research, this project brings light to the complexities around being a slave and life on a plantation. A burgeoning field of social justice work in public history and digital humanities, projects like this one give voices to the voiceless, fill historical voids of knowledge regarding minority communities' experiences, and provide the public with an opportunity to learn about problematic topics such as slavery and segregation.
Prairie View A&M University. He serves as Co-Principal Investigator on the Mellon Foundation-supported initiative, Enhancing the Humanities at PVAMU through an African-American Studies Program, and on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission-supported Texas Domestic Slave Project. He is the co-editor of Contemporary Debates in Social Justice: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Exploring the Lives of Black and Brown Americans (Kendall Hunt, 2021), and he has authored essays on the pivotal role played by women during the integration of public schools in North Mississippi as well as the efficacy of oral histories and collaborative work to document the histories of Black communities in the American South. Robinson also studies Afro-Latino and Caribbean history, and agricultural history
