Sarah Messbauer 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 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
was 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 awarded the 2015 Marnie
Dilling Prize at the Northern California Chapter of
the Society for Ethnomusicology’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.”
Graduate student Sarah Messbauer has been awarded the
coveted President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship for
academic year 2017–18. In addition to a stipend,
Messbauer has been invited to attend the prestigious
Annual Meeting of President’s Predoctoral Fellows and
Dissertation Year Fellows sponsored by the UC Office of
the President.
Sarah Messbauer has earned an Outstanding Graduate Student
Teaching Award for 2015. The award is co-sponsored by the
Graduate Council and the Office of Graduate Studies.
Two UC Davis ethnomusicology grad students—Gillian Irwin (first
year) and Sarah Messbauer (ABD)—share this year’s Marnie Dilling
Prize, presented by the Northern California Chapter of the
Society for Ethnomusicology for the best graduate student
presentations at its annual chapter meeting, which was held on
February 28, 2015, at UC Berkeley.
“Earth, Water, Science, and Song,” a Science and Society
course, is described in a California Aggie article
on March 13. The class connects the arts with the sciences,
teaching students environmental science while they also learn how
to write music and create songs. Ethnomusicology graduate
student Sarah Messbauer was the Teaching Assistant for SAS
42 during Winter Quarter 2014.
