Professor Robinson’s current research includes a social history of the transportation and transformation of 4000+ convict women and girls bought and shipped from Britain to the American colonies in the 17th and 18th C, sold as unfree labor, and economic and social legacies of their bondage. Her project at Manchester considers crime and fear of crime within the psychodynamic construct of annihilation anxiety. Other scholarship and activism consider psychological trauma from social contextual, social policy, and clinical perspectives, as well as cultural phenomena that reflect them, considering psychosocial and feminist theoretical frameworks. Recent work in this area includes an exploratory study of psychological foundations of power and relational violence amongst rural adolescents, vicarious traumatization as a product of trauma work, including an ethnographic-mixed methods study, and individual and collective responses to terror. She has worked in Ireland and the UK on matters of vicarious traumatization amongst anti-violence workers. Another project reinterprets Ruskin’s influence and current policy legacies about expectations of girls’ behaviors as they relate to gendered dynamics of virtue and personhood, in Britain and beyond.

Professor Robinson is a member of the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Clinical and Translational Science, Community and Academic Advisory Panel, and on the boards of several social justice non-profits and public agencies.