Kathy Roberts Forde is an American journalism historian with research interests in democracy and the public sphere, the Black freedom struggle and the press, the First Amendment, literary journalism, and the history of the book and print culture. She is the Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences. She served as Chair of UMass Journalism from 2014-2017; she is past chair of the AEJMC History Division and past associate editor of American Journalism. 

She is the co-editor with Sid Bedingfield of the book Journalism & Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 AEJMC History Division Book Award and the 2022 American Journalism Historians Association Book Award and finalist for the 2022 AEJMC Tankard Book Award. The book documents the active role white newspaper publishers and editors played in building and sustaining violent white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South from 1875-1920. You can find a discussion guide for Journalism and Jim Crow here.

Her book Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) received the Frank Luther Mott-KTA book award and the AEJMC History Division book award. 

Kathy is also co-editor of the new book series Journalism & Democracy at the University of Massachusetts Press with  Sid Bedingfield (University of Minnesota).