Bio

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Where do you Summer?

When I was fourteen, I won an academic scholarship to become a boarding student at the Canterbury School in New Milford, CT. At Canterbury, I was quite a stranger to the wealth of myclassmates. The first year that I was there a student asked me, “Where do you summer?” I didn’t understand the question until I realized that “summer” was being used as a verb—my classmates had summer homes.

Unable to relate to their class privilege, I also felt isolated from the other five Black students at the school—I was the only one not from the inner city. Instead, I grew up in a Connecticut suburb, where my father worked as an air traffic controller and my mother took care of the home. Socially marooned at boarding school, I focused on academics.

Academic Excellence

My commitment to academic excellence eventually paid off, and I gained admission to the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, I won a Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation, was inducted into the Mortar Board National Senior Honor Society and the Onyx Senior Honor Society. On graduation I won the Alice Paul Award, Raymond Pace Alexander Award, and the Althea K. Hottel Award, which is the highest senior honor award given in a class of 2,500.

Much of my recognition came because I was elected student body president. As the first Black woman to lead an Ivy League student government, I spearheaded an initiative to remove from university housing a fraternity with members who had been convicted of a sexual assault; this made a prime location available to a community service organization. My activism in college has been written about in Wayne Glasker’s, Black Students in the Ivory Tower: African American Student Activism at the University of Pennsylvania, 1967-1990 (p 168)

My experience of being the first Black woman to lead a student government in the Ivy League, while simultaneously being mentored by Mary Frances Berry, inspired me to wonder how the stories of Black women’s activism are told.

Exploring the stories of Black women’s activism

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota,

where I earned my Ph.D. in American Studies, writing my dissertation on Black women’s organizing in response to Black Power and the Second Wave of Feminism. At the completion of my Ph.D., I was one of two graduates in a class of sixteen to be nominated for the American Studies Association National Dissertation Prize. I graduated in May 1997, and in December was named one of Thirty Young Leaders of the Future under the age of thirty by Ebony Magazine. I spent the next years as a postodoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota Law School, which was directed by john a. powell at the time.

Duchess & Angela Davis

I joined the faculty at Macalester College in 1998. During the Spring 2003 semester at Macalester, several colleagues and I developed a proposal to create a new “Department of American Studies,” which would house the formerly independent but closely connected African American Studies and Comparative North American Studies programs. Collectively, we viewed American Studies as a rubric that should inspire collaboration and healthy debate about the borders and boundaries of citizenship, responsibility, and intellectual work. After finalizing the new program, I was proud to serve as the department’s first chairperson for the next two years. Under my leadership, we attracted twenty majors to the department, which placed us in the top third.

Bridging the barriers between academia and society

I was awarded tenure in 2004. In 2007 I decided that attending law school will allow me to expand my teaching possibilities further. I was admitted to William Mitchell College as a “William Mitchell Fellow” (1 of 21 in an entering class of 336). This program is “designed for the most exceptional students, this program links the student with a faculty member whose efforts and practical wisdom are changing the law itself.” I started taking courses in the part-time evening program, so that I could continue teaching at Macalester.

Duchess & Judge Alexander

Law School has already enhanced my teaching, as I have brought my students to a graduation ceremony for women graduating from Genesis II for Women, Inc., a community-based corrections program. Some of the women were participating in this program in lieu of a prison sentence. By having my students experience alternatives to incarceration first-hand, I was able to bridge the barriers between academia and society that can limit what we teach, what we learn, and what we write about in our scholarship. I hope to complete my JD in 2011.

Duchess Harris lives outside of St. Paul, MN with her husband Jon V. Thomas, MD, MBA and their three children; the oldest of whom thrives with autism.