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. a national conference convened at MIT in 1994 to address historical and contemporary issues faced by African-American women in academia. 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. She became the Dean of 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.
Research 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. Hammonds mainly studies the time period of the 17th century to present while focusing on history of diseases and African-American feminism. 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. She argues that black female sexuality (from the 19th century to present) was formed in exact opposition to that of white women. She argues that, historically, many black feminists have failed to develop a concept of black female sexuality. Hammonds then discusses the limitations of black women's sexuality and how that affects black women with AIDS. Hammonds believes black women are capable of more than their socially acceptable definition of their own sexuality, but yet they are unable to express it. This is a consequence of black women being unable to define sexuality in their own terms. She dates the earliest records of these definitions in the early 19th century with
Sarah Baartman as the "Hottentot Venus". and
Hortense Spillers's "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words". The article considers the silence of black female sexuality, particularly black lesbian sexuality, which she considers to be "doubly silenced." She uses physics and psychoanalysis to consider the void of black female sexuality and urges for a movement towards a "politics of articulation." In 1995, Hammonds, together with other black feminists including
Angela Davis,
Barbara Ransby and
Kimberlé Crenshaw, formed an alliance called the "African American Agenda 2000" to oppose Louis Farrakhan's
Million Man March, out of concern that it would further black male sexism.
E-mail search scandal at Harvard In March 2013, Hammonds and
Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean
Michael D. Smith announced that they had ordered a search of the email records of Harvard administrators in order to identify whether individuals had leaked information to the media regarding the university's investigation of the
2012 Harvard cheating scandal. Hammonds and Smith had asked the administrators whether or not they leaked any information to anybody, in response to
The Crimson publishing a description of an internal email regarding the cheating scandal and athletes' eligibility. No administrators came forward; Hammonds and Smith informed these administrators that there would need to be additional investigation. In response, Hammonds and Smith ordered an email search and identified the individual responsible for disseminating these internal email communications.
The Harvard Crimson called on Hammonds to resign. Then, on May 28, Hammonds announced that she would resign to lead a new Harvard research program on race and gender in science. Hammonds said that her decision to resign was unrelated to the email search incident. A review that the university commissioned from an outside law firm, released in July 2013, concluded that "FAS Administrators acting in good faith undertook [the email searches] in order to proceed with and complete the disciplinary proceedings of the Administrative Board and to protect the confidentiality of that process."
Notable publications • ''Childhood's Deadly Scourge: The Campaign to Control Diphtheria in New York City, 1880 – 1930'' (1999, Johns Hopkins University Press) •
The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics (2008, MIT Press) •
The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-first Century (2011, Harvard University Press) •
The Dilemma of Classification: The Past in the Present (2011, Rutgers University Press) ==Honors and distinctions==