[2] Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature and her essays on higher ed and artificial intelligence.

[8] She received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, and subsequently enrolled as a doctoral student in the department of communication at Stanford University in 1991.

[13] From 2006 to 2017 Robbins was a faculty member and then chair of the department of humanities at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University[14] where she taught a class in film music with Thomas Dolby.

[22] Previously, from 2018 to 2022, she was dean of the school of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California.

[24] In 2004, she began collaborating with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-edited In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative (2004).