#  Miriam R. Jorgensen 

Research Director

 

 

 



   ![Headshot of female with hair pulled back, dangling earrings, black jacket, in a natural setting.](/sites/g/files/omnuum6806/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2026-04/Headshot%20at%20Gunditjmara.png?itok=wVvEKZes) 

 



 

 email [miriam\_jorgensen@harvard.edu](mailto:miriam_jorgensen@harvard.edu) 

 



 

Miriam Jorgensen, a settler scholar, is Research Director for the Harvard Kennedy School Project on Indigenous Governance and Development and a Senior Researcher at the University of Arizona Native Nations Institute, the Harvard Project’s sister program. Jorgensen’s work—in the United States, Canada, and Australia—focuses on 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 enterprise management, financial education, asset building, child welfare, policing and justice system development, landback, and philanthropy.

She is co-author of *Indigenous Nation Building in Australia: Resistance, Resilience, Resurgence* (Bloomsbury 2026), *Structuring Sovereignty: Constitutions of Native Nations* (UCLA AIS Press 2014), and *The State of the Native Nations: Conditions under US Policies of Self-Determination* (Oxford University Press 2008); editor and co-author of *Creating Private Sector Economies in Native America: Sustainable Development through Entrepreneurship* (Cambridge University Press 2019), *Indigenous Justice: New Tools, Approaches and Spaces* (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), and *Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development* (University of Arizona Press 2007); and an author of both the U.S. Treasury Department’s two-part report *Access to Credit and Capital in Native Communities* (2016, 2017) and the Commission on Native Children’s report *The Way Forward* (2024).

She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Washington University Schools of Law and Social Work and a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Government and at the University of Technology Sydney Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research; has served as an instructor in economics at Harvard University and Washington University; designs curricula for and teaches in a variety of executive education programs for Indigenous leaders; and is a former member of the Swarthmore College Board of Managers.

Jorgensen received her BA in economics from Swarthmore College, MA in human sciences from the University of Oxford, and both an MPP in international development and PhD in political economics from Harvard University.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## Role
    
     [Staff](/role/staff)