Rachel Anne Gillett

Rachel Anne Gillett lectures in cultural history at the University of Utrecht and writes about race, popular culture and empire. She focuses on the French Empire and the Francophone Black Atlantic but her interests range from Marvel movies, to early jazz, to rugby. Her writing appears in blogs and magazines as well as in academic literature and she can be heard on “Unsettling Knowledge” a podcast about how empire shaped European societies. She is deeply interested in how popular culture reflects and influences social and political life and has pursued that theme wherever she has lived and worked, from New Zealand, to America, to the Netherlands. Her new book is entitled At Home in Our Sounds : Race, Music, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris.