Professor Sanja Bahun
- Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Sanja is an internationally recognised researcher and senior leader in higher education. With more than two decades of experience in shaping institutional strategy and ambition, she is a vocal champion of interdisciplinary and inclusive research practice.
Sanja joined the Royal College of Art in 2026. As the Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research and Innovation, she drives a strategic and integrated approach to world-leading research, ensuring that research and innovation are central to the RCA’s global leadership in art and design.
Sanja had formerly served as the University Dean of Postgraduate Research and Education, and the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, at the University of Essex.
She has also served on a range of national and international strategy and advisory boards, HE policy groups, research councils, academic associations, and peer review colleges.
She has partnered, or supported partnerships, with a wide range of academic institutions, cultural organisations, charities, and public bodies.
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Research interests
Sanja’s key area of expertise is international modernism, and her research interests include the theory of comparative arts, psychoanalysis, transitional justice, and women's and gender studies. She is the author or editor of more than ten academic books and numerous articles and essays on literature, cinema, visual art, avant-garde, and critical theory, as well as exhibition catalogues and two books of creative writing. Her research has been supported and funded by the EC, NEA, UKRI, HEFCE, Leverhulme and other funders. Her work has been translated into various languages and it features in the higher education curricula across the globe. She serves on the Editorial Board of Modernism/Modernity.
Practice
Sanja has curated exhibitions, events, and festivals. Most recently, she was the concept author and chief curator of the exhibition "Aktivitet: 100 Years of Surrealism" (Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade) which won the International Council of Museums' award for the Best Project (Serbia) in 2025.
Sanja has published her poetry and prose in two authored books, journals and anthologies.
Awards
The International Council of Museums' Award for the Best Project 2025 (Serbia)
Current and recent projects
Sanja is currently completing her work on research monograph Modernism and Home, an interdisciplinary project that examines the concept and affective experience of home in the work of artists, writers, thinkers, and designers of the early twentieth century.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Books:
Bahun, S. et al. (2025) Aktivitet: 100 Years of Surrealism (Belgrade: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2025)
Bahun, S. and Petrić, B. (2018, 2020) eds. Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues. London: Bloomsbury, Routledge.
Bahun, S. (2014) Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bahun, S. and Haynes, J. (2014) Cinema, State Socialism, and Society in the USSR and Central and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions. London: Routledge.
Bahun, S., Burtnett, L. and Main, R. (2013) Myth, Literature and the Unconscious. London: Karnac
Bahun, S. and Radunović, D. (2012) Language, Ideology, and the Human:
New Interventions. London: Routledge/Ashgate.
Bahun, S. and Rajan, J. (2011) Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras. London: Routledge/Ashgate.
Bahun, S. and Rajan, J. (2009) From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production.
Bahun, S. and Rajan, J. (2008; 2015) Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate. London: Ashgate/Routledge.
Bahun, S. and Pourgouris, M. (2006) The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Journal articles and book chapters:
Bahun, S. (2026) Selective / perspective: Mina Loy and the Female Homeless. Feminist Modernist Studies. 9(2)
Bahun, S. (2024) Pan-European Modernism. In: P. Rau and W. Rossiter, ed. Europe in British Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 180-196.
Bahun, S. (2023) ‘Part heathen, part Christian’: Recording Transitions and Amalgamations of Belief Systems in Constantine Cavafy’s Poetry. In: S. Hobson and A. Radford, ed. Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth, and Religion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 457-476.
Bahun, S. (2021) History and Active Thought: The Belgrade Surrealist Circle’s Transforming Praxis. In: M. Rabaté and A. Spiropoulou, ed. Historical Modernisms: Time, History, and Modernist Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 215-233.
Bahun, S. (2021) Marko Ristić, Surrealist Wall, Belgrade. In: S. d’Alessandro and M. Gale, ed. Surrealism beyond Borders. New York: Yale University Press/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 176-179.
Bahun, S. (2021) ‘Me you – you – me’: Mina Loy and the Art of Ethnographic Intimacy. In: E. Högberg, ed. Modernist Intimacies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 129-145.
Bahun, S. (2020) The Fabric of Home: Cotton Cloth between Ontology and Use-Value in Paul Klee’s and Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov Popova’s Artwork. In: N. Cuny and X. Kalck Modernist Objects: Literature, Art, Culture. Clemson: Clemson University Press, pp. 97-111.
Bahun, S. (2020) Beyond Good and Evil? Popular Songs, Mathemes, and Bus Rides (Art and Transition in the Region of Former Yugoslavia). Media, War, and Conflict 13(1), pp. 70-87.
Bahun, S. (2018) Gaps, Or the Dialectic of Inter-imperial Art: The Case of the Belgrade Surrealist Circle. Modern Fiction Studies 64(3), pp. 458-487.
Bahun, S. (2018) ‘Let Us Go, Then, Exploring . . .’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life. In: E. Högberg and A. Bromley. Sentencing Orlando: Virginia Woolf and the Morphology of Modernist Sentence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 68-79
Bahun, S. (2017) The Pleasures of Daldaldal: Freud, Jokes, and the Development of Intersubjective Aesthetics. Modernist Cultures 12(2), pp. 279-66.
Bahun, S. (2015) On Transience, Presence and Anticipation: Notes towards a Palimpsestic Approach to Temporal Literary Study, With Reference to 1915. Forum for Modern Language Studies 51(4), pp. 445-463
Bahun, S. (2015) Transitional Justice and the Arts: Reflections on the Field. In: N. Eisikovits et al. Theorizing Transitional Justice. London: Ashgate, pp. 153-166
Bahun, S. (2014) Broken Music, Broken History: Sound and Silence in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. In: A. Varga, ed. Virginia Woolf and Music, Bloomingdale: Indiana University Press, pp. 229-259.
Exhibitions:
(2025) Aktivitet: 100 Years of Surrealism, Museum of Contemporary Art – Belgrade. Belgrade.
(2013) Karmadavis: Art, Justice, Transition, firstsite Gallery, 10 November 2012 – 10 March 2013.