Email:

rdirksen@indiana.edu

Department:

Folklore and Ethnomusicology

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Rebecca Dirksen is an associate professor of ethnomusicology at Indiana 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. Her book on Haitian music, carnival and carnivalesque politics, After the Dance, the Drums are Heavy, was published in 2020, and she is a co-editor of Performing Environmentalisms: Expressive Culture and Ecological Change.

Her areas of expertise include: 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.