Jelena Gligorijević is a popular music scholar with a strong international academic record spanning Serbia, Britain, Finland, and Switzerland, and with multiple research interests – from Cavalera’s World Metal projects to queer karaoke. Her primary field of expertise is in issues of identity, power, and politics in Balkan popular music across the former Yugoslav region, notably Serbia. The best case in point is her doctoral dissertation titled Contemporary Music Festivals as Micronational Spaces: Articulations of National Identity in Serbia’s Exit and Guča Trumpet Festivals (2019), which explores issues of national identity in post-Milošević Serbia using the country’s two major music festivals as case studies. She is currently affiliated to University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where she is doing smaller-scale ethnographic research on cultural and political meaning-making surrounding St. Gallen’s alternative music venue “Palace”.