The Occidental College professor of Black Studies joins a 212-year-old national research library and community of learners dedicated to discovering and sharing a deeper understanding of the American past.
Ball, who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century African American history, joins a distinguished roster of more than 1,100 members. Elected for their achievement in academic or public life, AAS members range from scholars, collectors, and librarians to artists, writers, and history enthusiasts. Since the Society’s founding in 1812, 14 United States presidents, more than 75 Pulitzer Prize winners, scores of Bancroft Prize winners, many Guggenheim fellows, and several MacArthur fellows have been elected to membership.
“The American Antiquarian Society is an American treasure; I'm beyond honored to join them,” Ball says. “The society's collection of early African American print culture is truly extraordinary.”
Ball’s research explores two overlapping areas: she analyzes the ways African Americans have placed visual, print, and other forms of cultural production in the service of the long freedom struggle; and she examines the ways African Americans have engaged the popular memory of slavery, the abolitionist movement, and the Reconstruction era.
Her first book, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class, interrogates the links between early 19th-century African American advice literature, antislavery activism, and African American processes of middle-class self-fashioning in the antebellum North. She also wrote Madam C. J. Walker: The Making of an American Icon, a cultural biography of the groundbreaking African American hair-care pioneer, businesswoman, and philanthropist.
Ball is currently writing a book called Slavery in the American Imagination. The project tells the story of the contested popular memory of slavery in the United States in the 20th century and shows how African American activists, artists, and public intellectuals brought the fight against racism to the battlefield of popular culture.
Located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the American Antiquarian Society holds the world’s largest and most accessible collection of original printed, handwritten, and visual sources from before 1900 in what is now the United States. The library of over four million items includes books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, children's literature, music, and graphic arts material. AAS connects people across the globe with these collections through its digital catalog and resources, online exhibitions, and virtual learning experiences. In addition, it supports dozens of researchers, artists, and writers each year with a variety of fellowship programs. In 2013, President Obama presented the Society with the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony.
