Carolyn Roberts, PhD

Dr. Carolyn Roberts is an historian of science and medicine at Yale University. She holds a joint appointment in the departments of History/History of Science and Medicine, and Black Studies. She also holds a secondary appointment at Yale School of Medicine in the Program in the History of Medicine. Her scholarship demonstrates that historical research can be a powerful intervention in advancing health equity. Working at the intersection of history, Black Studies, medicine, STEM, and the health humanities, she investigates how recovering the histories of slavery, colonialism, and scientific knowledge can transform medical education, scientific practice, and public understanding.

Roberts is completing To Heal and to Harm: An Origin Story of Predatory Healthcare in the Western World (Harvard University Press), which traces the emergence of modern healthcare through the medical infrastructure of the British slave trade while recovering the central role of African medical knowledge in the making of Western medicine. Her scholarship has shaped physician and scientist training, medical school curricula, public history initiatives, and national conversations about race, medicine, and health equity.

An award-winning educator, Roberts created one of Yale’s signature interdisciplinary courses, Sickness and Health in African American History, which enrolled over 400 undergraduate and graduate students during its most recent offering. Bringing together students from medicine, public health, the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, the course introduced a generation of future physicians, scientists, policymakers, and scholars to the historical foundations of racial health inequities.

Roberts is also a popular workshop leader and speaker whose work has impacted learning and development strategies as well as organizational development at a variety of corporations, non-profit organizations, and institutions including PBS/NOVA, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mt. Sinai Morningside, and many colleges and universities. Her media appearances include the PBS/NOVA documentary The Violence Paradox and CNN.

A committed public scholar, Roberts believes that historical knowledge should extend beyond the university. She is the founder and director of the Body & Soul Community Health Initiative, a partnership between Yale University and the New Haven Public Library that brings scholars, clinicians, community leaders, and local residents together to explore issues of health, medicine, and social justice. Her work has also informed documentary films, museum exhibitions, community health initiatives, and public policy, reflecting her commitment to making historical scholarship a resource for healthier and more equitable communities.

Across her scholarship, teaching, institution building, and public engagement, Roberts demonstrates that history is more than a record of medicine’s past. It is a practical resource for transforming its future.

Roberts received a M.A. and PhD from Harvard University, an M.A. from Andover Newton Theological School, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.

Recent Publications:

• “Aetiological Politics, Mental Illness, and Affective Neuroscience in British Slave Trade Abolition,” Past & Present 271, Issue Supplement 18 (May 2026): 269-311.
• “Pharmaceutical Captivity, Epistemological Rupture, and the Business Archive of the British Slave Trade,” Business History Review 97, no. 2 (June 2023): 283-305.

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