Barbara Katz Rothman , PhD, is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at the City University of New York. Her work encompasses medical sociology, childbirth and midwifery, bioethics, race, disability, food studies, and the sociology of knowledge.

Her books include In Labor; The Tentative Pregnancy; Recreating Motherhood, The Book of Life, Weaving a Family: Untangling Race and Adoption, Laboring On (with Wendy Simonds), and A Bun in the Oven: How the Food and Birth Movements Resist Industrialisation. Her most recent book is The Biomedical Empire: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.

She held the 2019 Fulbright Saastominen Distinguished Chair in Health Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland, and has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society; the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Eastern Sociological Society and held visiting professorships and Fulbright awards in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.