Erica L. Ball is currently Professor of American Studies and Chair of African American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Her first book, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), interrogates the links between early nineteenth-century African American advice literature, antislavery activism, and northern free black processes of middle-class self-fashioning. She has recently completed co-editing with Kellie Carter Jackson a collection of scholarly essays on the iconic 1977 television miniseries Roots. Entitled Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics and Memory, the volume will be published by the University of Georgia Press in spring 2017. Ball is currently working on a cultural history of Slavery in the Modern American Imagination and study of beauty culture and black women's self-fashioning at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. In fall 2016, Erica L. Ball will join the faculty at Occidental College as Professor of American Studies.