Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts, and professions. She is also the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
 

An award-winning legal historian and an expert in constitutional law and education law and policy, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Law Institute, and the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Bar Foundation; a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians; and a member of the editorial board of the American Journal of Constitutional History and the board of directors of ProPublica. Brown-Nagin has published articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, including the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, the Affordable Care Act, and education reform, and her scholarship and commentary have been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Duke Law Journal, Law and History Review, POLITICO, the Washington Post, and the Yale Law Journal, among other publications.

Brown-Nagin’s latest book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (Pantheon, 2022), explores the life and times of the pathbreaking lawyer, politician, and judge. The Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and Time all cited it as one of the best books of 2022. Civil Rights Queen has also been short-listed for major literary prizes and optioned for a documentary film treatment. Her previous book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 2011), won a 2012 Bancroft Prize in American History, the Liberty Legacy Prize of the Organization of American Historians, and the John Phillip Reid Book Award by the American Society of Legal History, among other honors.

From 2019 to 2022, Brown-Nagin chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. As chair, she led the highly visible University-wide initiative and coauthored the committee’s landmark report detailing the University’s direct, financial, and intellectual ties to slavery. The effort resulted in Harvard’s unprecedented commitment of $100 million to redress harms to descendant communities in the United States and in the Caribbean. Harvard University Press published the report in book form in the fall of 2022. Lauded in the New York Review of Books and the Washington Post for its scholarly breadth and depth, the report has been nominated for several academic prizes.