LaShawn Harris

LaShawn Harris is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and Assistant Editor of the Journal of African American History (JAAH). Her area of expertise includes twentieth century African American and Black Women’s histories. Harris’s scholarly essays have appeared in The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, and the Journal of Urban History. Harris’s work has been widely featured in popular media outlets, including TV-One, Glamour Magazine, Elle, Vice, The Huffington Post, The History Channel, Black Perspectives, and Paramount Television Studios. Her first monograph Sex Workers, Psychics, and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2016. In 2017, Sex Worker, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Darlene Clark Hine award for the best book in African American women's and gender history. Currently, Harris is at work on a second monograph. This project tells the story of Black women and police violence during the 1980s.