Harriet Ritvo joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a lecturer in the Humanities Department in 1979 and was promoted to assistant professor in 1980.

From 1999-2006, Ritvo served as the head of the History Faculty at MIT as well as the director of Graduate Studies for the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) program from 2011-2013 and 2017-2018.

Since 2016, Ritvo has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.

Ritvo received a Whiting Award for nonfiction writing in 1990 following her first book, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987).

[5] In 2008, she was a recipient of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Graduate Society Award, which is awarded to Harvard and Radcliffe graduate alumnae who have made significant contributions in their field.