Sanja Bahun is professor of literature and visual arts and the pro-vice-chancellor for research and innovation at the Royal College of Art London. Her area of expertise is 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), 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. Bahun conceptualizes home as transcending physical geography and examines time outside conventional linear frameworks. By emphasizing juxtaposition, superposition and sedimentation, her approach is characterized by a complex, non-hierarchical layering of history, where space and time are never separated. She recently visited WashU to give the Center for the Humanities’ inaugural Global Humanities Lecture. She talked with comparative literature PhD candidate Amira-Géhanne Khalfallah  about her research and the use of comparative methods to explore time and the concept of home.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Professor Bahun, your work engages critically with questions of temporality and spatiality. Framed within debates on time, diachronic-based methodologies have been scrutinized, while the limitations of synchronic analysis have been equally established. How does your proposed approach navigate the tensions between these two paradigms? 

My particular strand of thinking argues for what you could call geology of sedimented synchronicity. Contemporary discussions of time reject the traditional diachronic approaches and focus instead on a moment in time, synchronically; but, when you try to parcel that moment, when you try to look at it through the depths of that moment, you always find sedimentations of history, weights of history, that accrue over time and inform each other. My approach to this challenging, and unresolved, question is one of arguing for the corrective of sedimentation to our synchronist thinking — to balance both diachronic and synchronic thinking with this notion of sedimentation.

Once you recognize the importance of sedimentation for our thinking, other ways to discuss time emerge. For me, one particularly interesting strand of thinking revolves around the concept of simultaneity, and how having such a view allows you to take up a piece, a parcel of sediment, that was buried at some point in time, say 500 years ago, and this present moment in time, and juxtapose them and think about them simultaneously. What insight does that give? What ethical insights about history does it also give you?

Turning to the concept of home, what methodological tools do we need to approach it as comparatists and what are the challenges?

Home is everywhere around us. It’s a universal concept, and it’s a concept that one can look at from a multiplicity of perspectives. Any person you encounter in the street would embody this multiplicity of perspectives. They would start by looking at home from a perspective of maybe emotional attachment, then they would move to which would be properly the discipline of psychology or psychoanalysis, affect theory, then they would immediately move to the discussion of actual spaces and abodes, which is the discipline of architecture and urban planning. Then they may talk about what the concept of home means more generally, which is, again, something that would be the provenance of philosophy. Some will say, immediately, it’s all about the ideology and language, the abuse of language, and then we are into the ideology analysis, discourse analyses.

So, even those who do not think about home as a scholarly subject as I do, adopt a multiplicity of perspectives and approaches. My own thinking about home has certainly been impacted by anthropology, including ethnography to a certain extent, and in particular, observer-participant ethnography. The participant-observation perspective is something that helps me understand the variety of ways in which people conceive, feel and experience home. Then there is certainly a psychoanalytic perspective, which is my theoretical background. It helps me reflect on why home attracts contrasting emotions: why, while we may feel that home is providing nurture and shelter, we may also experience home as uneasy, stifling, even dangerous.

In my lecture, I spoke a little bit about microhistories and oral histories and how important those are for me and for my project. History is another discipline that I include my thinking. Home always appears at the historical cross-section and is embedded in that history. This embeddedness leads me to the consideration of the material shelter, or, if you wish, the political side of history, which is linked to urban planning — for example, a discussion of homelessness and the types of shelter we can provide for the homeless, and what we have or have not provided throughout history. Very often when I travel to give a talk related to those ideas in my work, I search for homeless shelters in the area and give people an opportunity to reflect on what our reflections on home actually mean materially for homeless people today. 

You talked about home as a form of performance. Who performs and how? 

All of us actually perform “home” every day, because “home” is partly also a discourse, and it’s so much shaped by external and internal expectations. We all have our own ways in which we perform home. It could be individual, intimate performances at home, potentially for a very narrow audience of one or two, small “home rituals.” From an anthropological perspective — and some studies have discussed this at length — people define home most often precisely through the rituals and rites of everyday life. That’s what “feels” like home.

So, it’s less about brick and mortar, or having certain square-meter footage in your home, or even being in a particular area, and more about the rituals and rites, enshrined through sedimented time. Some of these intimate rituals are developed in collaboration with the external environment, what’s outside our home. For example: nature. People often perform home by bringing in part of the outside into their homes: bringing flowers, going out, opening the window — all of these tiny ways in which we interact with home space are actually constituting the home space.

When I say opening the window, it’s an interesting example, because you can also argue that closing the window is the way to perform your home, especially if your understanding of your home is more as an enclosure, or your fear of what’s outside. It’s saying something.

And this example brings us to the public performances of home. Think about the labels and tags we put on our homes. There’s a warning, “Beware of the Dog” sign at your front gate… You perform your home from that warning.

Finally, we very often perform home as a piece of theatre or tableau vivant. In 1929, Cavafy commissioned a photographer to take photos of him in his home, and he staged everything for that audience, from the composition of household objects to the lighting. He did so because he was very much aware he’s a public persona. His was a particular performance of an “artist’s home” for the public.

Who are the scholars you admire when it comes to questions of method and why? 

I have had many mentors, and I have appreciated the scholarship of many people, so I’ll name just a few who, on the one hand, have shown me greatest intellectual generosity, and, on the other hand, have demonstrated a very clear and articulate position of self- reflexivity. I really like Laura Doyle’s work on inter-imperiality not only because I feel it’s an interesting theoretical frame that we should be aware of, but also because she starts always with a position of self-reflexivity and acknowledging her own vulnerability and inability to actually know everything. I could also mention Caryl Emerson, a scholar of Slavonic cultures. I admire all scholars who approach difficult matters with the humbleness you need to have in front of things that you do not know when you start the inquiry, and most importantly those who preserve that humbleness. So maybe to summarize: I admire those scholars who are not epistemic imperialists. Another example is Hala Halim work’s on Egypt. When reading her for the first time, I felt she was fighting a battle that had to be fought for recognition of the particularities of space and microhistories but also acknowledged her own embeddedness in that space and the limits of knowing everything.

In terms of methodology, I am also fond of looking back at those “horrible” grand men and women of the past when I discuss the past. What I mean by that is that I always try to forge my methodology in relation to what was actually happening on the ground in terms of the theories and concepts that were present at that moment in time. I feel that, for example, Freud’s theories provide us with the best understanding of Freud’s period, in terms of affective experiences and challenges of that time. Irrespective of whether you are interested in psychonalytic thinking, whether you’re believe in the existence of the unconscious or not, when you read Freud, you understand the affective tenor of that era, and you understand the way in which questions about that time methodologically need to be posed. What I often do, then, is to go to the period of time that I’m addressing and try to call insights from not only theories but also artists and writers themselves, to take on the methodology that they themselves were developing. This is to prevent the unwitting epistemic imperialism on my own part!