Sarah Messbauer has been a graduate student at UC Davis since the fall of 2011. She graduated from Muhlenberg College in the spring of 2011, receiving a Bachelor’s degree with honors in anthropology and music. While at Muhlenberg, she received the Louise M. Cafouros Award for distinguished scholarship in the field of anthropology, as well as the Class of 1969 Award for Promising Work in the Field of Music. While at Davis, Sarah has received a Margrit Mondavi fellowship to facilitate summer research, a Center For Excellence in Teaching and Learning fellowship to organize and run the UC Davis Graduate Teaching Community, and a Bilinski Educational Foundation fellowship to support fieldwork research related to her dissertation. She has also been selected as a UC Davis Professors for the Future fellow for the 2015-2016 academic year. 

Sarah’s dissertation examines the planning and organization of Haitian-Canadian music events as a lens for illuminating current understandings of the influences of mass media, group identities, and linguistic politics in the creation and maintenance of diasporic communities in twenty-first century North America. She was recently awarded the 2015 Marnie Dilling Prize at the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusciology’s annual meeting for her conference paper entitled “We Are Who We Choose To Be: Conflicting Notions of Cultural Identity in Two Haitian-Canadian Music Festivals.”