Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty Lausevic, Mirjana

The students, faculty, and staff of Amherst College and scores of musicians, colleagues, and friends in the Pioneer Valley were profoundly honored to have Mirjana Laušević come to Amherst from the University of Minnesota to serve, along with her husband Tim Eriksen (AC ’88), as the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Assistant Professor of Music in the 2006-2007 academic year.  With her passing in July 2007, we lost a scholar of uncommon distinction and integrity, a teacher of unusual dedication and passion, and a friend of limitless generosity who called us to better ourselves and those around us.

Minja’s impact at Amherst was immediate and far-reaching.  As soon as she was among us, her smile, laughter, singing, accordion playing, rapier intellect, and committed scholarship transformed us all.  This is how Minja’s students describe her:

It is hard to summarize the impact Minja Laušević had on my life in the short time I knew her.  Minja was the kindest, most genuine person I will probably ever know.  She was a warm, loving person with a warm and loving smile.  And when she smiled at me, I believed myself capable of anything.  And when I think about her, I sing louder and with more confidence.  Minja is why I love music and why I have somehow retained my faith in humanity despite trying times.  Having her was life-changing, and losing her was devastating. But in the short time we had together, Minja managed to teach me how to live. She taught me that it is okay to love unconditionally, even when you’ve known someone for a very short time.

It seems that Minja was a born ethnomusicologist and, from her youth, held others to the same high standards to which she held herself.  When a professor at Sarajevo University in her native Bosnia gave an essay of hers an undeservedly mediocre mark, Minja confronted him with the fact that he clearly had not read her work and demanded that he read her essay, evaluate it fairly, and apologize before the entire University.  He did all of this, and Minja received the highest mark.  While working as a ski instructor in the 1980s in Ilidža, Minja was brought by a lift operator to a remote village on the other side of the mountain, where she encountered a song and dance tradition that was entirely different from anything she had previously known.

In 1988, she received her BA in musicology and ethnomusicology from Sarajevo University, where she worked as an instructor of ethnomusicology from 1989 to 1991.  During this time, Minja produced recordings, ethnographic films, and scholarship that testified to the rich, vibrant musical and social world in and beyond Ilidža—a world soon overcome by violence and war in the early 1990s.  Amid growing ethnic tensions in Sarajevo, Minja came to realize that it would be impossible to continue her career there.  She applied to graduate school at Wesleyan University, where she completed her Ph.D. in 1998.

In the fall of 1999, Minja joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.  There she became recognized as a naturally gifted teacher who inspired in her students the same extraordinary love of the world apparent in her scholarship.  For example, beginning in 2001, Minja engaged her students in an unusual ethnomusicological project called “A World in Two Cities.”  The goal of the project was to create a complete aural map of the diverse musical traditions kept alive by the Hmong, Ethiopian, Sudanese, and Laotian communities living in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Armed with microphones, music theory, and curiosity, Minja and her teams of graduate and undergraduate students roamed the Twin Cities, recording the sounds of an urban landscape teeming with song.  At the core of Minja’s project was a basic political and ethical desire.  As she put it in a 2003 interview, her project was an effort both “to bridge gaps” and “to understand how music survives.”

All of Minja’s work sprang from her deep humanistic sympathies, moral convictions, and fascination with how and why people make music.  After coming to the United States, Minja worked tirelessly to make peace and reconciliation in Bosnia a living reality.  Her research combined Eastern European and North American scholarly traditions in innovative ways in her work on the musical, cultural, and religious landscapes of the Balkan region.  As part of her collaboration on a documentary television project, for instance, Minja returned to rural Bosnia to ensure that the musicians and dancers she interviewed and filmed received fair compensation for their contributions.  And her efforts didn’t stop there.  Never afraid to act boldly or to speak uncomfortable truths wherever people were neglected or mistreated, Minja also enabled Bosnian women to create a sustainable livelihood for themselves by organizing ways for them to sell their handicrafts abroad.  She helped design and curate the Musical Instrument Museum, which will soon become the premier musical instrument museum in the world and, in 2004, organized a large concert to benefit the victims of that year’s devastating tsunami.  All this, of course, Minja accomplished alongside her flourishing life as a performing artist and devoted mother.  Whether it was leading shape-note singing with her dear friends in the Pioneer Valley, performing in her critically acclaimed band Žabe i Babe, or making her duly famous chocolate and cherry cakes, Minja led life with tremendous integrity, dignity, and grace with her beloved children Luka and Anja and her husband Tim always at her side.  What joy she brought to her music, her scholarship, and her activism was amplified, and no doubt will be continued through them.

In 2007, Minja published her pathbreaking monograph Balkan Fascination: Creating an Alternative Music Culture in America (Oxford).  She was tenured at the University of Minnesota in 2007, at which point she was internationally recognized as one of the leading ethnomusicologists of her generation.  Her gifts to the Amherst community are lasting, and I move that this memorial minute be adopted by the faculty in a rising vote of silence, that it be entered into the permanent record of the faculty, and that a copy be sent to Mirjana Laušević’s family. 

Jeffers Engelhardt   
Jenny Kallick   
Ted Levin (Dartmouth College, AC ’73)   
Deidra Montgomery (AC ’10)   
Klára Móricz   
Eric Sawyer   
David Schneider   
Adam Sitze