Professor Dorothy Roberts to Deliver 12th Annual Katz Lecture
Professor Dorothy Roberts will deliver the 12th annual Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, November 4, 2026 at 5:30 p.m.
Professor Roberts will present from her newest book, The Mixed Marriage Project, which was released in February 2026.
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Professor Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the 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 & Society and a MacArthur Fellow. An internationally acclaimed scholar, public intellectual, and social justice activist, Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive justice, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001); Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), as well as more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters. Other recognitions of her work include elections to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the National Academy of Medicine; Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Rutgers University and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award; Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize; and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award.
The Katheryn D. Katz ’70 Lecture Series was established in 2014 in honor of Professor Katz with a focus on the family law topics that Katz made central to her teaching, including domestic violence, gender and the law, children and the law, reproductive rights, and inequality.
Previous Katz lectures were delivered by Professors Melissa Breger (2015), Donna Young (2016), Mary A. Lynch (2017), Stephen Clark (2018), Jessica Knouse ’04 of the University of Toledo College of Law (2019), Rutgers Law School Co-Dean and Professor Kimberly Mutcherson (2020), Georgetown Law Professor Kristin Henning (2021), Dean of Temple University Beasley School of Law Rachel Rebouche (2022), Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor Emerita of Law at Columbia Law School Jane M. Spinak (2023), and Martin Guggenheim, Fiorello LaGuardia Professor of Clinical Law Emeritus at New York University Law School (2024), The Eleanor Bontecou Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School Solangel Maldonado.
