New Faculty Appointments

The Sainsbury Research Unit is pleased to announce the appointment of two new members of faculty who will be joining us in early September. We will be extending a warm welcome to Dr Laura De Becker as Lecturer in the Arts of Africa and Dr Jacopo Baron as Lecturer in the Arts of Oceania.

Dr de Becker will be taking up an Africa post after the departure of Professor Anne Haour to a Professorship in African Archaeology at the University of Cologne in Germany. Laura is an alumna of the SRU, having done both her MA (2007-08) and PhD (2008-12) with us, the latter, Remembering Rwanda: the commemoration of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’s National Museums and Memorials, under the primary supervision of Professor John Mack. She has since worked as a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Wits Art Museum, at the University of Witswatersrand in South Africa (2013-15), and then as Curator for African Art (2015-) and Chief Curator (2020-) at the University of Michigan Museum of Art at Ann Arbour – one of the biggest university museums in the USA. She is currently working with the National Museum of Ghana on an exhibition and research project, Ghana 1957: African Art after Independence, which will continue from her new SRU base.

Dr Baron will be taking up a new post generously funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. He completed his PhD at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2016-20), with a thesis entitled Gardens of the Mind: a study on Vanuatu sand-drawing. He recently held a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship (2021-23) at the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology, sponsored by the Fyssen Foundation; in Spring 2025 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the SRU. He is currently the Spokesman in Europe for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre and is finalising a monograph on his Vanuatu research. Among his responsibilities at the SRU will be helping develop a distance learning programme, especially for those unable to travel to the UK for a full year’s MA course or fellowship.