Rebecca Dirksen is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she completed her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 2012. Her main research concerns music and grassroots development in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. The projects she is involved in are related to the Haitian creative responses that arise from crises and disasters, the protection of the intangible cultural inheritage, cultural politics, and  classical music.