Lynn Rainville

Lynn Rainville is an author, public historian, anthropologist, and teacher. She has served as a professor and in a series of leadership positions at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, the University of Virginia, and Sweet Briar College. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Although her PhD is in Near Eastern archaeology, she has spent the last two decades studying historic American cemeteries, segregated schools, enslaved communities, poor farms, and World War I. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and numerous internal grants from Sweet Briar College. She shares her research through dozens of websites dedicated to local and African American history as well as talks at a variety of public venues. Her grant-funded research has produced numerous articles and books, including Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press, 2014); Sweet Briar College (Arcadia, 2015); Virginia and the Great War (McFarland, 2018); Invisible Founders: How Two Centuries of African American Families Transformed a Plantation into a College (Berghahn Press, 2019).

Learn more: www.lynnrainville.org.