Kathy Roberts Forde is an American journalism historian with research interests in democracy and the public sphere, the African American freedom struggle, 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. 

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. She is the co-editor with Sid Bedingfield of Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South, is forthcoming in fall 2021 with the University of Illinois Press. The book documents the active role white newspaper publishers and editors played in building and sustaining white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South from 1875-1920.

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