Erica L. Ball

ERICA L. BALL is the Mary Jane Hewitt Department Chair in Black Studies at Occidental College. Focusing on the ways African Americans have placed visual, print, and other forms of cultural production in the service of the long freedom struggle, her work explores the connections between African American expressive culture, class formation, and popular representations of slavery and abolition. Ball is the author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (2012) and Madam C. J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon (2021). She is also co-editor, with Kellie Carter Jackson, of Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory (2017), and co-editor, with Tatiana Seijas and Terri L. Snyder, of As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas (2020).