Carolyn Roberts

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 African American Studies.  She also holds a secondary appointment at Yale School of Medicine in the Program in the History of Medicine.  Her research investigates how medicine, science, and healthcare, both historically and in the present, can best support human thriving. 

As an historian, Dr. Roberts is particularly interested in mobilizing historical knowledge within strategic, targeted, multidisciplinary solutions in health care today.  With scientific rigor and compassion, Dr. Roberts has been actively creating usable history for medical and nursing students as well as other healthcare professionals.  She has also been involved with initiatives that promote scientific excellence among new generations of STEM students and faculty.

To further this work, Dr. Roberts is currently building the Tubman Lab for Health Innovation.  As an applied medical history and mixed methods research hub, the Tubman Lab seeks to design and implement pedagogical and curricular innovation in the health care education sector, cutting-edge research into harm reduction, and the development of community-driven health initiatives that create a trickle-up effect to improve quality of care at the institutions meant to serve them. 

Dr. Roberts is currently working on several book manuscripts, including To Heal and to Harm: An Origin Story of Predatory Medicine in the Western World, which is under contract with Harvard University Press.  The book tells the story of the health care system created to support the early modern human trafficking industry (i.e., the slave trade) and its current legacies.  Trafficking millions of African children, women, and men across the Atlantic posed a massive health care challenge that had never existed before in the history of the world.  Predatory medicine was an innovation born out of this unique moment when biology and economics, medical exploitation and profit existed in a bold new relationship.  With a focus on the British slave trade, Dr. Roberts delves deeply into the lived experiences of British and African doctors, scientists, nurses, patients, and apothecaries, as well as early British pharmaceutical companies, to demonstrate how the transatlantic slave trade helped birth medical modernity and how predatory forms of medicine remain with us today.

Dr. Roberts is an award-winning educator with deep passion for her students.  She is the 2023 recipient of Yale’s oldest teaching award, the DeVane Medal for Scholarship and Teaching.  She is the 2021 recipient of Yale’s prestigious Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.  Professor Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of science, medicine, and healthcare from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Professor Roberts’ courses draw hundreds of students, including her popular lecture course “Sickness and Health in African American History” which gained notice as the largest course enrollment at the university in Spring of 2022.  (The course is currently on hiatus).  In her classroom – whether with five students or five hundred – Professor Roberts creates learning communities that foreground care and compassion alongside scientific rigor and critical thinking as core competencies necessary to wrestle with the complex issues of our day.

Dr. Roberts is also a popular workshop leader and speaker who has worked with 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.

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

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