At Home in Our Sounds

At Home in Our Sounds examines the ways Black artists reacted to the heightened visibility of racial difference in interwar Paris, illustrating the effect jazz music had on the enormous social challenges Europe faced in the aftermath of World War I.

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 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.