Samuel Kelton Roberts is Associate Professor of History (Columbia University) and Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences (Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University). He writes, teaches, and lectures widely on African-American history, medical and public health history, urban history, and the history of social movements. His book, titled Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation(University of North Carolina Press, 2009) is an exploration of the political economy of health, urban geography, and race between the late nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, a periodization which encompasses both the Jim Crow era and the period from the bacteriological revolution to the advent of antimicrobial therapies. In this work, Roberts especially addresses the problem of pulmonary tuberculosis, one of the top killers of urban black Americans between 1890 and 1940. Contrary to conventional interpretations of public health history, Roberts argues that the local politics of race and labor greatly influenced the development of the early public health state. He has held several fellowships, including the Thurgood Marshall Dissertation Fellowship; the Schomburg Center for Black History and Culture (New York Public Library) Scholar in Residence Fellowship; a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars; and a Career Development Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Roberts earned the degree of AB in History and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia, and his MA and Ph.D. in History at Princeton University.
Roberts is currently researching and writing a book-length project which examines the policy and political history of heroin addiction treatment, 1950s-1990s, tracing urban policy at the beginning of the postwar heroin epidemic, through the adoption of methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) in the 1960s, and syringe exchange programs (SEPs) and harm reduction in the 1980s-1990s.
