Marguerite Itamar Harrison is a Sherrerd teaching award-winning professor whose interactive language and interdisciplinary courses in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies include The Brazilian Body; Eco Brazil: Key Environmental Issues; Questions of Travel: Narratives of Journeys and Migrations; and Multiple Lenses of Marginality: New Brazilian Filmmaking by Women.

Prior to Smith, Harrison taught at Harvard and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown. In 2007, she edited Uma Cidade em Camadas, a volume of transnational essays on contemporary Brazilian writer Luiz Ruffato. Raised in a Brazilian-American household, she is a practitioner of literary translation. She guest-edited a 2016 special issue of the translation journal Metamorphoses devoted to contemporary Brazilian fiction.

Harrison's work has appeared in Brasil/Brazil; Chasqui: Journal of Latin American Literature; Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea; Latin American Literary Review; Luso-Brazilian Review; Metamorphoses; Studies in Latin American Popular Culture and Women's Review of Books. Her scholarship in contemporary Brazilian fiction and art addresses ways in which literature and visual culture may contribute to raising social consciousness in terms of gender, class and race.

Her ongoing research on Brazilian filmmaking comments on the dictatorship's effects on marginalized groups, focusing on women filmmakers' challenge to dominant codes by redirecting the cinematic gaze to confront inequities.

Harrison contributes to programs in Latin American and Latino/a Studies and the Study of Women and Gender, and she is affiliated with the Concentration in Translation Studies.