Dr Sanja Perovic

Sanja Perovic obtained a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She taught at the University of Chicago as a Harper Fellow and in the French Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago before coming to King’s in 2008.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Eighteenth-century Literature and Culture
• French Revolution
• Representations and histories of time from the eighteenth century to the present
• Histories of Translation

Sanja’s research focuses on the long eighteenth century in France, with publications covering the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution. She also has broader interests in the politics and representation of time from the early modern period to the present. Her publications include The Calendar in Revolutionary France: Perceptions of Time in Literature, Culture, Politics (CUP, 2012) and Performance Art and Revolution: Stuart Brisley’s Cuts in Time (2023), on the English multi-media artist Stuart Brisley, widely hailed as a ground-breaking figure in British performance art.

Sanja Perovic is also PI of the AHRC-funded Radical Translations Project, which seeks to uncover the mobility of revolutionary language – tracking not only what it said, but how it travelled, where it went and what it became.

She welcomes students interested in any aspect of the interdisciplinary eighteenth century; the histories and imaginaries of revolution; and/or aesthetics and politics of time. For more details, please see her full research profile.

Teaching

Sanja teaches a variety of modules in the Department of French and in the Interdisciplinary Eighteenth-Century MA programme. These include an MA module on 'Rights before Human Rights: Eighteenth-Century Theories and Representations', sections of the MA core course in Critical Theory and a variety of undergraduate modules including Shadows of Enlightenment and (whenever possible) The French Revolution Effect (with Dr. Rosa Mucignat)

Expertise and Public Engagement

• From 2012-2020, Co-Director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's
• From 2013-2022, informal conversations/collaborations with British multi-media and performance artist Stuart Brisley and his frequent collaborator Maya Balcioglu on revolutionary time. This was instigated by an initial collaboration with the fiction writer Tony White (Creative-Entrepreneur-in-Residence 2013/14). These collaborations resulted in several publications, new fiction by White, a new performance by Brisley, and public talks: Kunsthal Aarhus (2014); Oxford Modern Art (2014); MAC Belfast(2015); Raven Row (2017)
• From 2019: worked with translator Cristina Viti, Dr. Rosa Mucignat and students at KCL, Toulouse, Bordeaux and University of Bicocca-Milan to collaboratively translate revolutionary-era manifestos and theatre
• From 2015: collaboration with the dramaturge Simon Hatab and King’s students to create a series of performances and a film on the theme Performing Utopia, based on texts by the French revolutionary playwright Sylvain Maréchal
• Radio appearances: BBC Radio Four ‘On Our Time’ on Olympe de Gouges; BBC Radio 3 on Beaumarchais for broadcast of Rossini's Barber of Seville (September 17, 2016); Resonance FM
• Public Talks on various aspects of revolutionary time at Parasol Gallery (2012), Camden Arts Centre (2015), Glyndebourne Opera (2016)