Smiljana Đorđević Belić, PhD

Smiljana Ðordevic Belic was born in 1978 in Jagodina. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade (the Department of Serbian Literature with General Literature). She obtained her Master’s Degree at the above faculty in 2006, where she also obtained her PhD Degree in 2010, having defended a doctoral thesis entitled Contemporary Epic Singing – Text and Context.

From 2003, as a recipient of a grant awarded by the Ministry of Science of the Republic of Serbia, she was engaged on the project Serbian Oral Creations in a Balkan Context at the Institute for Literature and Art in Belgrade. She became a full-time collaborator on that project in 2004. Today, she is engaged on the project Serbian Oral Creations in an Intercultural Code in the capacity of a scientific associate.

She has participated in the international scientific project Oral Tradition of Serbian Epic Poems and its Cultural Expression, which was realised with the support of UNESCO and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia at the Institute for Literature and Art in 2004, and in the project Language and Identity, realised under the aegis of UNESCO at the Serbian Language Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2008.

She deals with theoretical studies and interpretation of “classical” and contemporary folklore materials, as well as field research into oral culture. The field work encompasses various ethnocultural communities in a number of regions: Serbs and Muslims in the vicinity of Priboj and Nova Varoš, Serbs in Kosov? (the municipality of Zubin Potok), Serbs in the villages in the vicinity of Boljevac, Serbs in eastern Herzegovina, the Bayash in central Serbia, Roma in Belgrade, Bunjevci in Backa.

Her research interests are focused on the methodological problems of field research into folklore, issues pertaining to the conceptualisation of identity in the key of tradition, anthropological interpretations of folklore texts, the ideologies and ideologisations of traditional phenomena, issues pertaining to the reception of folklore.