Dr. Lynn Rainville earned a Ph.D. in near eastern anthropology and archaeology from the University of Michigan. In addition to her Mesopotamian household research, she has studied African American cemeteries and mortuary traditions in Virginia since 2002 and historic New England cemeteries since 1991. This work has been supported by numerous grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and several, internal Sweet Briar grants. Since 1998 she has taught the University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, the University of Virginia, and Sweet Briar College. She has also taught non-traditionally aged college students through Mary Baldwin’s Adult Degree Program, the Osher Life Long Learning Institute, and the University of Virginia’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.  Several of these classes address mortuary variability, cemetery landscapes, and gravestones carvings in burial grounds throughout the world.  In 2008 she was appointed a research professor in the humanities at Sweet Briar College where she is the founding director of the Tusculum Institute dedicated to local history and historic preservation. She has held multiple digital fellowships at the University of Virginia and has created over a dozen websites dedicated to local and African American history. Her latest book is titled Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia (University of Virginia Press 2014).

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