Modernism and Home, with Notes on Method
GLOBAL HUMANITIES LECTURE
The exploration of home is one of the most attractive, exciting and challenging investigations for a comparative scholar: It necessitates bridging spaces, disciplines and methodologies. In this talk, Sanja Bahun will discuss the ways in which a range of modernist artists and thinkers both nourished and responded to significant paradigm shifts in our thinking about home at the beginning of the 20th century and reflect on the opportunities and challenges of using comparative methods to discuss them.
About the speaker
Sanja Bahun is Professor of Literature and Film, the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and, from July 2026, the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the Royal College of Art. She is the author or editor of Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (2014), The Avant-garde and the Margin: New Territories of Modernism (2006), Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008, 2015), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production (2009), Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras (2011), Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions (2012), Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious (2013), Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917-1989: Re-Visions (2014) and Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2018, 2020), alongside numerous articles and essays in the area of international modernism, intellectual history, literature, cinema, visual art and avant-garde. She is a concept author and chief curator of the project and exhibition Aktivitet: 100 Years of Surrealism (2024-25), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, which won the International Council of Museums’ award for the Best Project in 2025. She is completing a monograph on modernism and home.