The Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU), based in the Sainsbury Centre at UEA, is a centre for the study of the arts and material culture of Africa, the Pacific region and the Americas.
It has six permanent academic faculty supported by library and administrative staff. Visiting fellows, research associates and postdoctoral researchers working on special projects also contribute to the academic life of the SRU.
It has its own teaching and study facilities and a specialist research library known as the Robert Sainsbury Library, all on hand in the Sainsbury Centre.
Our courses
The SRU offers MA and PhD degrees, with generous scholarships and funding support for students. MRes and MPhil options are available.
It also offers visiting fellowships for postdoctoral scholars and hosts regular conferences, symposia and other academic meetings.
The MA and PhD programmes are intended for those interested in careers in higher education, museums and galleries, publishing, journalism and development.
Our research and teaching
Combining anthropological, art-historical, archaeological and museological approaches, SRU research and teaching are focused on the distinctive cultures of the three regions.
It has a particular focus on how artworks and objects are made, used and circulated – in effect, how they matter to people, both in their original contexts and in the contexts of museums and exhibitions.
As part of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA the SRU contributes to a substantial and lively scholarly community in the Sainsbury Centre.
Our people
Events and News
Sanja Savkic Sebek is a scholar specialising in Latin American Indigenous societies’ art and visual culture, particularly focusing on Mesoamerica and New Spain. Upon completion of her PhD in Art History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), for which she received the Alfonso Caso Medal, her research won support from leading institutions such as UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) – Max-Planck-Institut [Max Planck Institute for Art History in Florence], where she held postdoctoral positions. Most recently, she worked as a research associate within the International Research Group “Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology,” affiliated with the KHI and the Humboldt University in Berlin. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the Sainsbury Research Unit (SRU) for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas, University of East Anglia, and an associate fellow at the KHI.
Sanja’s research lies at the intersection between art history, anthropology, and archaeology, exploring themes such as the mobility of images and objects, materiality, colour, time and space in visual arts and architecture, Maya and Aztec writing systems and their relations with visual arts, and Mexican feather art. Among her recent publications is Indigenous Visual Cultures and Aesthetic Practices in the Americas’ Past and Present, edited with Hannah Baader (Berlin: Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, 2019), and her forthcoming publications include The Challenge of Mobile Images and Objects in Mesoamerica, edited with Rex Koontz, and Material Transformations in Amerindian Artistic Practices (edited with Bat-ami Artzi and Elizabeth Baquedano).
During her stay at the SRU, Sanja will be working on the introduction to the latter book and preparing the volume for its publication. This volume draws from the academic event Amerindian Art Histories and Archaeologies: A KHI – UCL Symposium on Material Transformations in the Indigenous Americas. It brings together sixteen studies exploring the significance of materiality and material transformations in the context of ancient, colonial, and contemporary indigenous societies across North, Central, and South America.