Royal College of Art appoints Professor Sanja Bahun as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research & Innovation

The Royal College of Art is pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Sanja Bahun as new Pro Vice-Chancellor of Research & Innovation.

Sanja is an outstanding academic leader and brings more than two decades of experience shaping research strategy, doctoral culture and institutional ambition. She joins from the University of Essex, where she serves as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, having previously held the role of University Dean of Postgraduate Research and Education. In both roles, she has led significant academic portfolios, strengthened research performance, and championed major funded research projects.

Her area of expertise is in international modernism, with research interests covering the theory of comparative arts, world literature, psychoanalysis, and women’s and gender studies. She has an extensive and influential body of published work including: Modernism and Melancholia: Writing as Countermourning (Oxford UP), From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women's Aesthetic Production (Cambridge SP), Thinking Home: Interdisciplinary Dialogues (Routledge), amongst others, and her recent "Aktivitet: 100 Years of Surrealism" (2024-25) exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade won the International Council of Museums' award for the Best Project in 2025.

Alongside her academic leadership, Sanja has secured major external funding and built impactful partnerships including with Research England, the OfS, AHRC and ESRC. Most recently, she was Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-funded research project on modernism and home as well as a PI on the Research England and the Office for Students funded strategic development project “Transitions and Transformations: Widening Access and Participation in Postgraduate Research”.

At the RCA she will focus on enhancing research culture, accelerating research intensity, strengthening the postgraduate research offering, and expanding interdisciplinary and externally-funded activity, as well as ensuring that research and innovation are central to the RCA’s global leadership in art and design. Her appointment comes at a moment when the RCA advances its institutional ambitions to drive a strategic and integrated approach to world-leading research; launching a new Research and Innovation Strategy, as well as bringing interdisciplinary researchers together across the College to build on its strengths.