Molly Robinson

Biography

Molly Robinson is a PhD candidate in American Studies. Her work attends to the overlaps and intersections of kinship, land tenure, and contested belonging among Black descendant communities with limited access to their ancestral homelands. These themes motivate her dissertation, which uses oral histories, land deeds, survey maps, court testimonies, and photographs among other texts to reconstruct the story of a 1918 federal commandeering that dispossessed hundreds of Black families of land on the Virginia Peninsula. Currently in operation as the Naval Weapons Station Yorktown, this 11,000-acre military installation was once home to Black communities that had established churches, schools, and fraternal organizations prior to and after the Civil War. Molly partners with descendants and the Village Initiative’s Local Black Histories Project, a grassroots nonprofit, to bring this history to light through interactive online exhibits.

Her dissertation is a sibling project to the research that she completed as a student in UC Berkeley’s Folklore Program, where she was supported by the Alan Dundes Fellowship in Folklore (2019-2020). There, Molly wrote about Gullah/Geechee sweetgrass baskets, a craft that embodies the environmental, economic, and real estate forces that have dramatically transformed South Carolina’s Low Country over the past hundred years. Her writing on sweetgrass baskets has appeared in Panorama and PLATFORM, and completion of her MA thesis was supported by the Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina. In addition to sharing the common denominator of Black-owned land loss, Molly’s past and current work is animated by the question: How do communities articulate and fight for a vision of what should be communally accessible in spaces shaped by privatization, militarization, and discriminatory discourse on who belongs? 

Education

B.A., Anthropology, University of Chicago 

M.A., Folklore, University of California, Berkeley