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, she is the author of groundbreaking scholarship. Brown-Nagin’s 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, and it garnered widespread praise. The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Smithsonian Magazine and Time all cited it as one of the best books of 2022. And “Civil Rights Queen” won several prizes, including the 2023 Order of the Coif Book Award, the 2023 Darlene Clark Hine Award and the 2023 Lillian Smith Book Award. 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.

In addition, Brown-Nagin’s scholarship and commentary on the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, and education reform have been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Duke Law Journal, Law & History Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Washington Post and POLITICO Magazine, among other publications.

From 2019-22, Brown-Nagin chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. As chair, she led the highly visible university-wide initiative and co-authored the committee’s landmark report detailing Harvard’s direct, financial and intellectual ties to slavery. Lauded in the Post and The New York Review of Books for its scholarly breadth and depth, the report was nominated for several academic prizes.

Brown-Nagin has served as dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute since 2018. During her tenure, she has helped recruit excellent faculty to Harvard, expanded Radcliffe’s renowned fellowship program to academics and artists from a broad array of backgrounds and institutional affiliations, increased student engagement and built partnerships with community-based organizations.