Ethnomusicologist Rebekah E. Moore returned to the United States and American academe in 2017 after a decade-long career in international public and private sectors. Her professional scope has included performance production, band and tour management, media and sponsor relations, and activism for gender equality, health equity, and climate justice.
Her teaching and research are driven by a commitment to showing how musicians and artists are essential workers who empower us to make meaning, find connection and community, and imagine—and thus activate—our way to better futures. To do this, she builds on ethnomusicological approaches to music as social life, pursued through the ethnographic methodology of participatory action research, and communicated with an interpretive lens that combines emergence and agency theories and transformative justice principles.
Dr. Moore’s current research coalesces an interdisciplinary team of artists, activists, and scholars in the arts and health sciences to investigate inclusive participation in the arts as a critical public health intervention on structural racism and its predictive adverse health outcomes. She is also investigating pathways to improving high school music education access in Boston. She has published academic articles in the Asian Journal of Communication, Asian Music, Collaborative Anthropologies, and Inside Indonesia, and her work will appear in the forthcoming anthologies At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press) and Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music (Cornell University Press). As a freelance journalist in Indonesia, she published dozens of articles in tourism and entertainment magazines Hello Bali, Jakarta Java Kini, and Jakarta Beat, and the country’s only feminist media outlet, Magdalene. She is currently writing a book based on her fourteen years of research in Indonesia: The Rise of Rock Gods in the Last Paradise traces Bali’s long history of cultural and environmental exploitation through the biography of a Balinese rock band.
Beyond academia, Dr. Moore is a co-founder and project advisor for Bersama Project, a registered Indonesian nonprofit that confronts violence against women and LGBTQ+ young people through music and the arts.
She holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from Indiana University, an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, and a BA in music from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
