Dr. Myisha S. Eatmon is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies and History. Dr. Eatmon was a research fellow and a tenure-track Assistant Professor in History at the University of South Carolina before she joined the faculty at Harvard in 2022. Professor Eatmon is a Chapel Hill, North Carolina native who received a B.A. in Political Science and History from the University of Notre Dame. She also holds an M.A. in United States history and a Ph.D. in United States, African American, and legal history from Northwestern University.

Dr. Eatmon is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled, Litigating in Black and White: Black Legal Culture, White Violence, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies, which explores how Black people challenged white violence during Jim Crow. Her manuscript-in-progress also examines the crystallization of what she has coined “Black legal culture” under Jim Crow and the meaning of legal education and networking within communities with few opportunities to earn Juris Doctorate degrees (especially under Jim Crow). Professor Eatmon is the author of “Fighting Back: Black Civil Litigation for White-On-Black Violence under Nineteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-First Century Jim Crow,” in The Civil War Era and the Summer of 2020: Race, Violence, Resistance and Memory in the United States, ed. Hilary Green and Andrew Slap.

Professor Eatmon has earned numerous grants, the American Historical Association’s Littleton-Griswold Research in Legal History Research Grant among others. She also received the Mellon/American Council for Learned Scholars Dissertation Completion Fellowship in 2018. As a member of the American Society of Legal History, Dr. Eatmon was selected as a Kathryn T. Preyer Fellow and J. Willard Hurst Fellow through the American Society for Legal History and the University of Wisconsin School of Law. Dr. Eatmon is currently an ALSH Wallace Johnson First Book Program Fellow and a William Nelson Cromwell Early Career Scholar Fellow.

Dr. Eatmon’s strong interest in social justice drives her research, service, and teaching, all of which focus on the ways that oppressed persons, particularly African Americans, use their legal imaginations. She is committed to developing courses that bring together the history of race, power, the law, and our current historical moment.

Curriculum Vitae