Duchess Harris, J.D., Ph.D

Duchess Harris is the author of four books. She co-authored Black Lives Matter (Essential Library) with Sue Bradford Edwards, authored Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton/Obama (Palgrave Macmillan), and published an edited volume with Bruce Baum, Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity(Duke University Press).  Her fourth book, which will be out in January 2017, is also co-authored with Sue Bradford Edwards. This book tells the story of the Black women at NASA who did the mathematical calculations that led to John Glenn’s 1969 Moon Landing.  It will be released along with the Hollywood Motion Picture, “Hidden Figures,” which stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monae.  Dr. Harris has a digital archive dedicated to this research:  http://omeka.macalester.edu/humancomputerproject/timeline

Professor Harris was a Mellon Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated from PENN in 1991 with a degree in American History and Afro-American Studies. Six years later, she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. After receiving her PhD in 1997, Harris was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Womanist Studies Consortium.  This was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship Residency Program affiliated with the Institute of African-American Studies at the University of Georgia.

In 1998, Harris joined the faculty at Macalester College. She became the first Chair of the American Studies Department in 2003 and was granted tenure in 2004. In 2007 she decided that attending law school would allow her to expand the scope of her scholarship even further. In 2008, she was the only law student in the country chosen to be an Associate Editor for Litigation News, the American Bar Association Section’s quarterly flagship publication.  In 2009, she won a $96,000 fellowship from the Bush Leadership Program, which encourages their recipients to create positive change in their communities.  In 2010, she enhanced the William Mitchell College of Law’s community and created positive change as the first Editor-in-Chief of Law Raza Journal, an interactive on-line race and the law journal.