About

Ph.D. African and African American Studies – Harvard University
M.A. History – Harvard University
M.F.A. Design – University of Texas at Austin
B.A. Fine Art – University of Pennsylvania

Robin B. McDowell (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Affiliated Faculty of Africana Studies. Her work explores historical dimensions of environmental racism and visions for environmental justice for Black communities. Through narratives of south Louisiana wetlands, sugar plantations, oil fields, and salt mines, her work demonstrates how racial, environmental, and economic encounters in these spaces shaped conditions of Black life. Her first book project, Black Bayou: Race, Ecology, and the Transformation of Louisiana Wetlands, is a history of bonds between race and environment on a geologic time scale. Her transdisciplinary research methodology draws on archives, oral histories, earth sciences, graphic design, and multimedia art making.

Affiliations:

• History Design Studio A workshop for developing, critiquing, and producing new projects in multimedia history at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
• The Louisiana Museum of African American History An educational, historical and research organization and museum that focuses on the struggles of Africans and African American people.
• Black Louisiana History Incubators in the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, co-hosted by Johns Hopkins University and Michigan State University.
• The Commonwealth Project Taking root in the Midwestern region of St. Louis, professors and students cooperate with cultural producers, activists, attorneys and local politicians on community-led justice initiatives and historical research.

Publications:

McDowell, Robin, “‘Wet and Unfit for Cultivation’: Racial Fantasy, Environmental Control, and Viscous Archives of South Louisiana,” Journal of American Studies / 한국아메리카학회 학술지 53 (3), December 31, 2025.

McDowell, Robin, “Know Your CCC’s: The Crescent City Connection and The Chinese Cajun Cowboy.” Southern Cultures “Katrina’s America” Special Issue, October 2025.

McDowell, Robin, “‘There Are Lives Here:’ The African and African American Cemeteries of the Bonnet Carré Spillway.” in “The Political Lives of Infrastructure,” Radical History Review 147, October 2023.

McDowell, Robin, “The Plantation Imagination: Studies in Salt, Oil, and Sugar” in “counter/cartographies” Special Issue of you are here: The Journal of Creative Geography, October 2023.

Teaching:

• ENVR205 Lives in Place: Inroduction to Environmental Humanities
• ENVR234 FREE THE LAND: Histories of Environmental Racism in the U.S.
• AFR/ENVR381 Black Geographies: Space, Place, and Ecologies of Power