View a recording of the event.

An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, Dorothy Roberts, J.D., has written and lectured extensively on the intersection of race and gender in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics.

Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the university’s Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also Founding Director of the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society.

Roberts is the author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and more than 100 articles and book chapters, as well as the co-editor of six books.

She has served on the boards of directors of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Black Women’s Health Imperative, and the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform and on the advisory boards of the Center for Genetics and Society, the Family Defense Center, Generations Ahead, and Still She Rises. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Harvard Program on Ethics and the Professions, and the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Recent recognitions of her work include Columbia’s 2017 Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award, the Society of Family Planning 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award, and the American Psychiatric Association 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award. In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.

This event is co-organized by the Knapp Social Science Center and the Women's and Gender Studies Program.

This event will be livestreamed at https://www.wellesley.edu/live.