Rhae Lynn Barnes is Assistant Professor of American Cultural History at Princeton University and specializes in the globalization of American popular culture and racism. While at the American Library in Paris, Rhae Lynn worked on her first book, Darkology: When the American Dream Wore Blackface, which maps the political, economic, and global cultural geography of amateur blackface minstrelsy. She also conducted research for a new edition of the Image of the Black in Western Art series. She is Executive Advisor with Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the four-part PBS documentary series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. Rhae Lynn earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

The American Library in Paris Visiting Fellowship was created in 2013 to nurture and sustain a heritage as old as the Library itself: deepening French-American understanding. The Visiting Fellowship offer writers and researchers an opportunity to pursue a creative project in Paris for a month or longer while participating actively in the life of the American Library.

The Visiting Fellowship is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.