Rhae Lynn Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University and the leading expert on the history of amateur blackface minstrelsy. She is a historian, editor, and onscreen commenter specializing in the globalization of American popular culture. Her research and teaching focus on the histories of racism, racial formation, gender, sexuality, book history, and cultural representation. She is the co-founder of US History Scene (www.ushistoryscene.com), which provides open access teaching resources to thousands of public schools in the United States and Executive Advisor with Henry Louis Gates Jr. to the four-part PBS documentary series “Reconstruction: America After the Civil War” (now available to stream online).