Maja Vasiljević

Biography

Maja Vasiljević (1980) holds a Ph.D. in sociology and a master’s degree in musicology and works as a Research Associate at the History Department of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Since 2003, she has been engaged in music criticism on the Second Program of Radio Belgrade, in the programs Classics Please, Cultural Circles, and How to Listen to Music, and she also acted as an expert consultant for historical issues in the Cultural and Educational Program of the National Television of Serbia. She completed studies in musicology at the Department of Musicology, Faculty of Music, University of Arts in Belgrade in 2007 and sociology at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade.

Permanently interested in the relationship between Nazism and music, after her master’s thesis Treatment of degenerate music in the Third Reich, she obtained her doctorate in sociology on the related topic of the relationship between musical practice and discourse on biopolitics by Michel Foucault and Holocaust studies. Since 2012, she has been the secretary of the scientific journal Limes plus for social sciences and humanities and Acta historiae medicinae. She is consistently interested in the music of “problematic” and “excluded”, i.e. minorities – Jews, Czechs, Russians, and others, as well as musical practices and musicians in dramatic periods of great social changes in European history – the Great War, the Cold War, and the Second World War. So far, the topics of her works have been musical practices at the border of sociology, musicology, and history with an emphasis on the relationship between music and politics.

Recently, she has been expanding her interdisciplinary research through the research of populism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia as a researcher on the Horizon 2020 inter-consortium project about the populist rebellion in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She was also part of the digitization projects of Jewish heritage in Vojvodina from the 18th to the 19th century. She is the author of two studies: Jewish Musicians in Belgrade: From the Balfour Declaration to the Holocaust (Jevrejski muzičari u Beogradu: Od Balfurove deklaracije do Holokausta, 2021) and Film Music in the SFRY: Between Politics and Poetics (Filmska muzika u SFRJ: Između politike i poetike, 2016).