Frances Smith Foster is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies.  She regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in African American literature and culture and in women’s literature and culture.  Recent course offerings have been “The Profession of English,” “Family, Marriage and (Sexual) Morality in 19th century America,” “Slavery and the African American Literary Imagination, “Becoming a Woman,” and “African American Prize-winning and Prize-worthy Literature.”  She has edited or written more than a dozen books, including Love and Marriage in Early African America, Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-Bellum Slave Narrative.   She has edited, alone or jointly, works that include The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature as well as editions of several African American women’s texts including Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley.