Evelynn M. Hammonds

She also helped organize the first national academic conference for black female scholars, Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name 1894-1994 a national conference convened at MIT in 1994 to address historical and contemporary issues faced by African-American women in academia.

Evelynn Maxine Hammonds (born 1953) is an American feminist and scholar.

She is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, and former Dean of Harvard College.

The intersections of race, gender, science and medicine are prominent research topics across her published works.

Hammonds received degrees in engineering and physics.

Before getting her PhD in the History of Science at Harvard, she was a computer programmer.

She began her teaching career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later moving to Harvard.

Hammonds was born in Atlanta, Georgia on January 2, 1953, to Evelyn Baker Hammonds and William Hammonds Jr. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father was a postal worker.

Her father aspired to become an engineer, after studying chemistry and mathematics, but was unable to attend the segregated Georgia Institute of Technology.

Evelynn M. Hammonds became interested in history and science as a student at Collier Heights Elementary School in Atlanta and this interest was fostered by an early exposure to science through her parents.

Her high school education was disrupted by integration and discrimination, forcing her to switch from Charles Lincoln Harper High School to Daniel McLaughlin Therrell High School in 1967.

After experiencing discrimination from students and teachers, she completed her secondary education at Southwest High School.

A National Merit Scholar, Hammonds attended Spelman College where she enrolled in a joint engineering program with Georgia Institute of Technology.

In 1976 she graduated from both universities with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering respectively.

While she was an undergraduate, she spent two summers working at Bell Labs through a research fellowship program that recruited minorities in the sciences.

The program provided structured mentorship and placement within a lab group, and she recalls, "... it was my first exposure to the world of big science. It had a profound effect on me, and I really wanted to do well."

It was during her work here that she was first published, and she became friends with Cecilia Conrad.

Conrad took Hammonds up to Boston, as Conrad was a student at Wellesley College at the time, and they visited the MIT campus together which impressed Hammonds and inspired her.

Then, because of the Society of Physics Students at Spelman College, Hammond was introduced to Shirley Ann Jackson and Ronald McNair.

She recalls that Jackson was, "the first black woman I ever met who was a physicist, and ... she went to MIT so that's how I pretty much decided that [MIT] was the only place I wanted to go."

Following graduation, she attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a PhD program but left the course of study early in 1980, earning a master's degree in physics.

Upon leaving academia, she began a five-year career as a software engineer, but found this to be unchallenging and returned to Harvard University.

In 1993, she graduated with a PhD in the History of Science.

Upon graduation from Harvard, Hammonds was invited to teach at MIT.

While she was there, she was the founding director of MIT's center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine.

In 1997, Hammond's article "Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence" was published in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader.

In this article, Hammond focuses on the intersection of black female sexuality and AIDS.

In 2002, she returned to Harvard and joined as a professor in the departments of the History of Science and of African and African-American Studies.

In 2008, Hammonds was appointed dean, the first African-American and the first woman to head the college.

She received the title of Dean at Harvard College in 2008 and was the 4th black woman to receive tenure within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.

Before this, Hammonds had served as the first senior vice provost for Harvard's Faculty Development and Diversity.

In February 2022, Hammonds was one of 38 Harvard faculty to sign a letter to the Harvard Crimson defending Professor John Comaroff, who had been found to have violated the university's sexual and professional conduct policies.

The letter defended Comaroff as "an excellent colleague, advisor and committed university citizen" and expressed dismay over his being sanctioned by the university.

After students filed a lawsuit with detailed allegations of Comaroff's actions and the university's failure to respond, Hammonds was one of several signatories to say that she wished to retract her signature.

Hammonds' research focuses on the intersection of science, medicine, and race.

Many of her works analyze gender and races in the perspective of science and medicine.

She is concerned with how science examines human variation through race.

She returned to full-time teaching in 2013.

Hammonds mainly studies the time period of the 17th century to present while focusing on history of diseases and African-American feminism.

She argues that black female sexuality (from the 19th century to present) was formed in exact opposition to that of white women.