LaShawn Harris

LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of History at Michigan State University and assistant editor for the Journal of African American History. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Women's History. Harris is also the author of the prize-winning Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize (Best Book in African American Women’s and Gender History) from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Philip Taft Book Award (Best Book in American Labor & Working-Class History) from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. The book explores the lives of African American women in New York City’s expansive informal economy by drawing on police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature. More broadly, Dr. Harris’s research engages with women, gender, and sexuality; labor and the working class; urban history; and social and cultural change. She received a Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 2007.