Ingrid Banks, Associate Professor. Professor Banks' research and teaching areas include: African American Studies (Race, Gender, Sexuality, Culture, History); Beauty Culture; Black Feminist Studies; Sociology of the Body; Race and Racism (United States); and Ethnography and Qualitative Research Methods. She is the author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness (New York University Press, 2000). Professor Banks has published essays and book chapters in the following: Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities; Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire; Feminist Frontiers (Ninth Edition); Feminist Teacher, and Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair. She is currently completing a book manuscript based on a fourteen-month multi-city ethnographic study that examines the past and current significance of Black beauty salon culture.