Carolyn Roberts

Assistant Professor of African American Studies and History

Carolyn Roberts is a historian of early modern medicine. Her research and teaching interests broadly concern medicine, race, and slavery in the Atlantic world. Her current book project, To Heal and to Harm: Medicine, Knowledge, and Power in the Atlantic Slave Trade, is the first full-length study of the history of medicine in the British slave trade. The project studies the pharmaceutical and medical labor performed by a largely unknown group of African and British women and men, both enslaved and free. Roberts’ research has been supported through numerous fellowships and awards—most recently from the John and Elizabeth Armstrong Fellowship, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Consortium for the History of Science, among others. She holds degrees from Harvard University, Andover Newton Theological School, and Dartmouth College.