Virve Sarapik is an art and culture scholar and a professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts Institute of Art History and Visual Culture. She received her Ph.D. in semiotics and cultural theory from the University of Tartu in 1999 and has done postgraduate work at the Universities of Oslo, Helsinki, Oxford and Ljubljana.
In addition to the EAA, Sarapik has worked at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences (1998–2002) and at the Estonian Literary Museum (2003–2013). She has also been the principal investigator of several state funded research projects. From 2017–23, she headed the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the EAA.
Sarapik’s research interests focus on the relationships between different art forms – literature and visual art – and the metatexts that mediate these relationships (criticism, art historiography). At the theoretical level, she has mainly engaged with topics of picture theory and spatial representation, a line of research that was closely linked to the series of events and publications Koht ja Paik / Place and Location (1998–2007). The empirical material for her research has above all been sourced from the late Soviet and transition period, but she has also studied the modernization processes in early 20th century Estonian culture.
From 2002–21, Sarapik was editor-in-chief of the journal Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture. She was one of the founders of the conference and publication series Etüüde nüüdiskultuurist (Studies in Contemporary Estonian Culture), and has edited several collected volumes on the culture of the Soviet period.
CV in the Estonian Research Information System