Ankica Petrovic is a specialist in the music of Eastern Europe, in particular of her native Bosnia. She was the central figure in Bosnian musicology and ethnomusicology from the late 1970s to the early 1990s and had extensive connections to an international community of scholars interested in the region. She chaired the Department of Musicology at the University of Sarajevo in the late 1980s and early 1990s until the war there made her work and that of her colleagues untenable. She has resided in the U.S. since the mid-1990s and has
held residencies at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Duke University, the University of Washington, as well as UCLA.

Petrovic has a number of articles in English-language refereed journals, including The World of Music, and Asian Music. Her work also appears in important edited collections, including Music, Gender, and Culture (1990), Tradition and its Future in Music (1991), Music Cultures in Contact (1994) and Folklore and Traditional Music in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1997). She has also written articles for the two major music encyclopedias, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music.

Petrovic also has extensive experience as a producer of audiovisual media. She published a CD with extensive notes, Musics of an Endangered World: Bosnia Muslim Music, for Smithsonian Folkways (1993) and a documentary film, The Key From Spain: The Songs and Stories of Flory Jagoda (2000) that has been screened at a number of film festivals, receiving critical acclaim. She has produced numerous radio documentaries on music for Radio Sarajevo, as well as a series of programs on Balkan music broadcasted on the BBC London, Radio Brussels, and in Israel.

Back to faculty list.