Eva Krekovičová

Assoc. Prof. PhDr. Eva Krekovičová, DrSc. is a leading Slovak ethnologist and ethnomusicologist. She graduated in ethnography and folklore studies from the Faculty of Arts at Comenius University in Bratislava and in 1981 defended her dissertation on contemporary (folk) song research at the Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Ústav etnológie SAV).

Her research focuses on the theory and methodology of ethnology and ethnomusicology, song, musical folklorism, identity, Slovak communities abroad, stereotypes, and collective memory. Within ethnomusicology, she has specialized in vocal traditions and their transformations.

In 1975, she joined the Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. She conducted numerous field studies on cultural phenomena, as well as folk and popular songs in Slovakia, publishing analytical studies on vocal repertoires and the cultural bearers of these traditions.

She has shared her expertise through teaching positions at the departments of Ethnography and Folklore Studies, Comparative Religion, and Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. She has also lectured at universities in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Germany, and at academic forums and conferences both in Slovakia and internationally.

As early as the mid-1980s, her approach was recognized for its creativity and innovation. She drew on scholarly stimuli not only from ethnology and ethnomusicology but also from the broader humanities and social sciences. She adopted systems theory and responded to earlier impulses from structuralism, which had influenced European and Slovak scholarship since the 1960s. The initial results of her research were published in the scientific monograph O živote folklóru v súčasnosti. Ľudová pieseň (On the Life of Folklore Today: Folk Song, 1989).

Eva Krekovičová is also the author of the first scholarly monograph on Christmas carols in Slovakia, Slovenské koledy. Od Štedrého večera do Troch kráľov (Slovak Carols: From Christmas Eve to Epiphany, 1992). At the invitation of German colleagues, she published a groundbreaking monograph Obraz Rómov a Židov v slovenskom folklóre (The Image of Roma and Jews in Slovak Folklore, in German 1998; in Slovak 1999). The political use and misuse of the term “folklore” and various folkloric expressions was a central theme of her eighth book Mentálne obrazy, stereotypy a mýty vo folklóre a politike (Mental Images, Stereotypes, and Myths in Folklore and Politics, 2005).

Further insights from her long-term research are summarized in the chapter Ľudová pieseň (Folk Song) in the collective monograph edited by R. Stoličná: Slovensko. Európske kontexty ľudovej kultúry (Slovakia: European Contexts of Folk Culture, English edition 1995; Slovak edition 2000). She was also a member of the authorial team behind the Encyklopédia ľudovej kultúry Slovenska (Encyclopaedia of Folk Culture in Slovakia), for which the team received the international G. Pitré – S. Marino Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize in Ethnology.”

As head of the Centre of Excellence of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Centrum excelentnosti SAV), she served as editor of the extensive collective monograph My a tí druhí. Konštrukcie a transformácie kolektívnych identít (We and the Others: Constructions and Transformations of Collective Identities, 2009). The work of the research team of the Centre of Excellence was recognized with the Award of the Minister of Education of the Slovak Republic and the Deputy Prime Minister in the category Research Team of the Year 2009

Eva Krekovičová has also served as the principal investigator of several VEGA and bilateral research projects and is an active member of international research teams. She mentors doctoral students and serves as the academic supervisor for the PhD program in ethnology at the Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is a member of international scholarly organizations such as the International Society for Folk Narrative Research and the International Society for Folklore and Ethnology, and serves on numerous academic and editorial boards abroad. She is a member of the editorial boards of Národopisná revue, Slovenský národopis (Slovak Ethnology), and the international editorial board of Polski rocznik muzikologiczny (Polish Musicological Yearbook, Section of Musicologists, Association of Polish Composers, Warsaw, Poland). In 2008, she became a member of the Learned Society of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (Učená spoločnosť SAV).

She has completed academic residencies at MAD – Institute of Folklore, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia, Bulgaria), MAD – Warsaw, Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw, Poland), Jagiellonian University (Kraków, Poland), MAD – Institute of Ethnology and Musicology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest, Hungary), Research Institute of Slovaks in Hungary (Békéscsaba, Hungary), DFG Foundation, DAAD Foundation, Deutsches Volksliedarchiv (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany), University of Łódź (Łódź, Poland), Institute for East European Culture and History (Oldenburg, Germany), Internationale Institute for Traditional Music (Berlin, Germany), Institute of Ethnomusicology, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Ljubljana, Slovenia), Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), University of Opole (Poland), among others.