Duchess Harris

Duchess Harris is a Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. She is also an affiliated member of the Political Science Department and co-directs the Congress to Campus Program with Professor Andrew Latham.

Harris was a Mellon Mays Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She graduated with a degree in American History. In 1990, she was elected Student Body President, making her the first Black woman to serve in this role at an Ivy League institution. Harris earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. Twenty-five years after earning her degree, she was asked to deliver the prestigious David Noble Lecture at her alma mater. While in graduate school, she worked for the late U.S. Senator Paul D. Wellstone and attended Yale’s First Summer Campaign School in 1994. She completed a policy fellowship at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Georgia. She earned a J.D. from Mitchell Hamline College of Law and is now a trustee.

Harris has advocated on the national level at the Congressional Black Caucus. Locally, she was appointed as a Minneapolis Civil Rights Commissioner by Mayor Sharon Sayles Belton, appointed to the Governor’s Council on Black Minnesotans by Governor Jesse Ventura, appointed to co-chair the Statewide Martin Luther King Holiday (twice) by Governor Mark Dayton, and appointed to the Board of Public Defense by Governor Tim Walz. She served on the Shirley Chisholm Presidential Accountability Commission during the Obama Administration and is currently a member of the Kamala Harris Project.

Her research has been published in the London School of Economics and Political Science Review of Books, American Quarterly, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy, Litigation News, and the Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal. Her academic books include Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity with Bruce D. Baum (2009 Duke University Press), Three editions of Black Feminist Politics, 2009, 2011, 2018 (Palgrave Macmillan), and Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag: Twenty-First Century Acts of Self-Definition with Julia Jordan Zachary (2019 University of Arizona Press). She is also the proud curator of the Duchess Harris Collection, (ABDO Publishing), which has 120 books written for 4-12 graders.