Carolyn Roberts

Carolyn Roberts is an historian of science, medicine, and the Atlantic world whose 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 teacher, 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. She also founded Conversations with Doctors, a mentoring initiative that connects pre-medical students from historically underrepresented backgrounds with physicians, residents, and medical students, expanding pathways into medicine through mentorship, community, and professional guidance.

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.

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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