Dr. Rasmussen is associate professor of music and ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia where she also directs a Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. As an ethnomusicologist, Rasmussen teaches courses that deal with music outside of the Western art music tradition including Worlds of Music, an introduction to Ethnomusicology, Music Cultures of the Middle East, World Music and World Religion, Music and Gender, Music and Politics and so forth. In 2001 she received the Phi Beta Kappa Faculty Award for Excellence in teaching.

Her current research concerns Islamic musical arts in Indonesia and female reciters of the Qur'ân. She was a Fulbright senior scholar based in Jakarta in 1999 and an article, based on that research won the Jaap Kunst prize for the best article in the field of ethnomusicology in 2001. In the year 2003 Rasmussen traveled to Indonesia three times for further research and fieldwork and is at work on a book tentatively titled "Women's Voices, the Recited Qur'ân, and Islamic Musical Arts in Contemporary Indonesia."

Dr. Rasmussen has been involved in studying, teaching and performing Middle Eastern music since 1985 in conjunction with her studies at the University of California at Los Angeles with Ali Jihad Racy and for her fieldwork among Arab Americans in communities across the country.