Erica L. Ball

Erica L. Ball is the Mary Jane Hewitt Chair of Black Studies at Occidental College. She received her BA in History from Wesleyan University and her PhD in History from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Ball is the author of To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (Georgia, 2012) 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 (Cambridge, 2020). Ball’s most recent book is Madam C. J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).