Erika Denise Edwards, Ph.D. spent her formative years in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She and her twin sister, Lydia Edwards (Mass State Senator) were raised by her divorced mother, an Air Force veteran. (Debates still rage on whether they are identical twins, but clearly, they were 'identical' enough because she dressed up like Lydia during her campaign for state senate so 'Lydia' was able to be in two places at once.)
Upon her return, she joined the McNair program and continued to study and research Argentina's black history for two summers. After she graduated from Grand Valley State University she enrolled in Florida International University's Atlantic History Doctoral program. In order to support her research, she was awarded a Fulbright and Ford Dissertation Fellowship. She graduated in 2011 and began working at UNC-Charlotte's Africana Studies Department as a Lecturer and the following year obtained a tenure track position in the History Department where she was recently tenured.
Edwards has published various articles and book chapters about Argentina's black past. Most recently she published Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of White Argentine Republic. This book is a gendered analysis of black erasure in Argentina. It has won the 2021 Western Association of Women Historian's Barbara "Penny" Kanner Award, the Association of Black Women Historians' 2020 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize, the 2021 Finalist for the 021 Finalist for the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery's Harriet Tubman Book Prize of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and named one of the best Black History books of 2020 by the African American Intellectual History Society. Her research advocates for a re-learning of Argentina's black past and the origins of anti-blackness. Her advocacy extends to the Charlotte community.
