Rebecca Dirksen

Rebecca Dirksen is an associate professor of ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora, her research concerns cultural approaches to development, creative responses to crisis and disaster, dialogues of sustainability and diverse environmentalisms, and applied/engaged/activist scholarship.

Her work has been published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology Review, the Bulletin du Bureau d’Ethnologie de la Republique d’Haïti, Conjonction and elsewhere. A book on Haitian music, carnival and carnivalesque politics is forthcoming.

Areas of Expertise

Haiti and its diaspora; African diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America; cultural approaches to grassroots development; creative responses to crisis, disaster, poverty and violence; dialogues of sustainability and diverse environmentalisms; carnival and the carnivalesque; intangible cultural heritage and cultural policy; applied / engaged / activist ethnomusicology.