Ingrid Banks is Associate Professor of Black Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Banks' main research and teaching areas are within African American Studies and include race, gender, and culture. Her research and teaching areas also examine beauty culture, black popular culture, black feminist theory, politics of the body, critical race theory, and ethnographic methods. She is the author ofHair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness (New York University Press, 2000). Dr. Banks' publications appear in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Feminist Teacher, Work and Occupations, Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Feminist Frontiers (Sixth Edition), The Chronicle of Higher Education,and New York Newsday. She is currently preparing a book manuscript based on a fourteen-month multi-city ethnographic study that examines contemporary black beauty salon culture. In 2004-05, Dr. Banks was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City.