DOROTHY ROBERTS
Dorothy Roberts is a groundbreaking scholar, social justice advocate, and award-winning author whose work has transformed how we think about race, family, science, and the law. A distinguished professor of Africana studies, law, and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is widely known for her influential books, including Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, which received a 1998 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award and 1998 Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare, which received a 2003 Research Award from the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community and 2005 Outstanding Achievement of Cultural Competency in Child Maltreatment, Prevention, and Intervention Award from the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children; and Torn Apart: How The Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (Basic Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times 2022 Book Prizes and Society for the Study of Social Problems 2023 C. Wright Mills Award; won the Association for Humanist Sociology 2023 Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award; received American Sociological Association 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award honorable mention; and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo 2022 Book Prize for Social Justice. Her latest book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, published in February 2026, invites readers into the experiences that forged her voice as an acclaimed champion for justice.
