Miriam Jorgensen
Research Director, Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development
Program Involvement
Miriam Jorgensen is Research Director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development and its sister program, the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona. Dr. Jorgensen received her BA in economics from Swarthmore College, MA in human sciences from the University of Oxford, and MPP and PhD from Harvard University.
Her areas of specialty are Indigenous governance and economic development, with a particular focus on the ways communities’ social and cultural characteristics affect development. Her work has addressed issues as wide-ranging as welfare policy, policing and justice system development, enterprise management, financial education, asset building, and philanthropy.
She is a co-author of The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination(Oxford University Press, 2008) and editor and co-author of Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development (University of Arizona Press, 2007).
She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Washington University Schools of Law and Social Work; has served as an instructor in economics at Harvard University and Washington University; teaches in the Native Nations Institute’s executive education program for tribal leaders; and is a former member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers.