A native of Bulgaria , Petko Ivanov lived and studied in Syktyvkar (Komi Republic , Russia ) as a child. He received his B.A. in Slavic Linguistics and Literatures from Sofia University and specialized Polish language, folklore and literature at the Jagiellonian University ( Krakow ) and University of Warsaw ( Poland ). For number of years he worked at the Institute of Folklore of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, from which he received his M.A. in Balkan & Slavic Ethnography. In 2001 he defended an M.A. thesis in Anthropology at the University of Chicago with the paper "The Value of Difference: An Essay on the Universalism and the Limits of Alterity." Currently Petko Ivanov is a Ph.D. student at the Slavic Department of the University of Chicago and is working on his dissertation in Slavic language ideologies, with particular stress on the contested Cyrillo-Methodian identities of the Slavic nations. As part of his dissertation project he recently spent a year in Moscow .

Petko Ivanov is the co-author of a book on folk Christianity and has published a number of scholarly articles in several languages dealing with ethnography of religion, language engineering and codification, as well as the literary cannons of the Slavs. He has taught many courses in Russian language and culture at the University of Chicago and Beloit College. In his spare time he enjoys talking, watching movies, playing chess and collecting Russian kitch.