Jennifer Stacey Harcourt Brown was born in Providence, Rhode Island on December 30, 1940. She obtained an A.B. (Hons) in Ancient & Medieval Culture from Brown University in 1962. She received an A.M. in Classical Archaeology from Harvard University the following year. In 1976 she completed her Ph.D in Cultural/Social Anthropology at University of Chicago. Brown taught at Colby College in Waterville, Maine from 1966-1969. She taught at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb intermittently from 1969-1982 and also on a sessional basis at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, and Indiana University. She was editor for the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane University from 1975-1982. She came to the University of Winnipeg as an Associate Professor in History in 1983. She was made a full professor in 1988. In 1997 she became the Director of the Centre for Rupert's Land Studies. In 2004 she became Canada Research Chair for Aboriginal Peoples and Histories.
Dr. Brown has published extensively in fur trade and Aboriginal history. Her book Strangers in Blood, published by University of British Columbia Press, received Honorable Mention for the Canadian Historical Association's Sir John A. Macdonald Prize. In 2002 she received a British Academy Visiting Professorship at the Institute of Social & Cultural Anthropology and Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy II (Social Sciences) in 2008. For a more in-depth account of her career consult Brown's vitae in Box 1 Fd. 1 of both of the first two accessions. Dr. Brown retired in 2011.