Professor Harris is the chair of the American Studies Department at Macalester College. The author and coauthor of four books (Hidden Human Computers: The Black Women of NASA and Black Lives Matter with Sue Bradford Edwards, Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity with Bruce Baum, and Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Clinton/Obama), she has been an associate editor for Litigation News, the American Bar Association Section's quarterly flagship publication, and was the first editor-in-chief of Law Raza Journal, an interactive online race and the law journal for William Mitchell College of Law. She has earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and a Juris Doctorate from William Mitchell College of Law.