Adriana SABO, PhD
(Research associate)
Email: sabo@mdw.ac.at
Adriana Sabo is a musicologist and a popular music scholar, with special interest in the relationship between music and gender. She obtained her PhD in 2025, from the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia), with the thesis titled “’Me fancy, you nothing’: mechanism of producing the empowered femininity within the contemporary Balkan music identity”. Through this research, she explored how the figure of empowered femininity is being produced and perpetually renegotiated within the Balkan music industry, through intersections with tropes of labor, sexualization, “the Balkans”, and rethinking of feminism and gender norms. She thus engaged with the broader matters of productions of subjectivities within neoliberal capitalist societies, and with how empowerment helps shape femininities within them.
Her research interests are directed towards understanding how, primarily popular music is lived and experienced by different people and social groups. She focuses especially on how capitalist market relations shape not only the production of public personas, identities and subjectivities of performers, but also of those who consume popular music. She is interested in the inner-workings of the music industry, as well as of how various gender-specific and feminist discourses correspond to, and are related to capitalist modes of production.
Other than a master’s degree in Musicology from the Faculty of Music in Belgrade (2012), she also holds a master’s degree in Gender studies, from the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade (2015).
Adriana Sabo is currently involved with the project “Made in YUGOSLAVIennA: Balkan Music and Multiple Marginality”, furthering her research into various uses of the “Balkans” label/category across the region and its vast diaspora, as well as its correlation to the lives of female-presenting and queer musicians and audiences. This project is a logical continuation of her previous research given that the region's diaspora has strongly shaped the music industry and trends in the Balkans for decades, and vice versa.