Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Lawyer, scholar, and academic administrator Tomiko Brown-Nagin was born on April 23, 1970 in Edgefield County, South Carolina to Lillie and Willie Brown. Brown-Nagin received her B.A. degree in history summa cum laude from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina in 1992, her J.D. degree from Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut in 1997, and her Ph.D. degree in history from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2002.

After graduating from law school, Brown-Nagin worked as a clerk for Federal District Court Judge Robert L. Carter at the United States District Court, Southern District Court of New York in 1997 and for Federal Court of Appeals Judge Jane R. Roth at the United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit in 1998. In 1999, Brown-Nagin was named a Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow with Harvard Law School and a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University. In 2001, she was hired as an associate with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York, New York and after two years, she joined Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri as an associate professor of law and history. Brown-Nagin then joined the University of Virginia in Charlottesville as a professor of law and history in 2006. In 2012, Brown-Nagin was hired as a professor of law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2018, she was promoted to dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she oversaw interdisciplinary research in the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and professions. In 2019, she chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, which released a landmark report on Harvard University’s ties to slavery. Brown-Nagin published numerous books, book chapters, and articles including Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement in 2011, Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of American Empire, co-edited with Gerald Neuman in 2015, and Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality in 2022.

Brown-Nagin is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Law Institute, and the American Bar Foundation. She holds bar memberships with the New York State Bar, the United States District Court, Southern District of New York, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bar. Brown-Nagin is also a member of The Links, Inc. and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Brown-Nagin has received numerous awards and honors. These include a Distinguished Alumni Award from the Duke University Graduate School in 2022 and an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Furman University, in 2023. She has received numerous prizes for books Courage to Dissent and Civil Rights Queen, including the Bancroft Prize, the Order of the Coif Award, the Liberty Legacy Award, the John Phillip Reid Book Award, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and the Darlene Clark Hine Book Award.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on February 27, 2023.