Professor Wallace- Sanders is an Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts and in the Institute for Women’s Studies at Emory University. Originally from New York, Wallace-Sanders holds a MFA in English from Brown University and a PhD in American Studies from Boston University. She teaches courses on cultural representations of the female body, race, gender and visual culture, representations of race, and gender in American culture, contemporary feminisms nineteenth-century African-American popular culture and African-American material culture.

In 1997, Wallace-Sanders co-founded the Comparative Women’s Studies Program at Spelman College with the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, it was the very first Women’s Studies major established at an HBCU. Professor Wallace-Sanders’ scholarly interests include the intersections of race and gender in visual culture and 19th century cultural representations of Black female sexuality. Professor Wallace-Sanders served as a judge for the Emory University 2009 LGBT essay contest.

Professor Wallace-Sanders’ books include the edited volume Skin Deep. Spirit Strong: Critical Essays on the Black Female Body in American Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2002, the only scholarly book nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her most recent book Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory (University of Michigan Press, 2007) won the 2002-3 Provost Manuscript Development Program Award at Emory University. Her scholarly work appears in American Quarterly, Initiatives, SAGE: A Scholarly Black Woman's Journal, Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity (Harper Collins, 1996) and The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Identity and Authority in the Academy, (SUNY York, 2003). Women in Popular Culture: Representation and Meaning (Hampton Press, 2008) and Black Womanhood: Images Icons and ideologies of the African Body (Hood Museum, 2008)

She is currently working on a unique book of 19th and early 20th century photographs called Mammy: Portraits from the South and an essay on feminist interpretations of the groundbreaking Kenneth Clark “black doll test” used to measure self-esteem in African American children in the Brown v. Board of Education.