This advanced doctoral course provides an interdisciplinary foundation for understanding medievalism as a global cultural phenomenon and an ongoing process through which “the medieval past” is continually reimagined, reconstructed, and mobilised across periods, media, and societies. Moving beyond Eurocentric perspectives, the course traces medievalism’s long durée from the early modern era to the present, examining its diverse expressions across Europe, Asia, Latin America, North America, and Australia.
Students engage critically with key theories and debates in medievalism studies, including distinctions between reception and medievalism, the roles of visual and popular culture, and the entanglements of medievalism with nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Readings in scholarship are paired with close analysis of cultural artefacts - literature, art, architecture, heritage sites, and public history - to explore how “the medieval” functions as a creative, ideological, and affective resource in varied contexts.
Combining comparative and place-based approaches, the course incorporates local case studies to consider how medieval pasts are materialised, interpreted, and embedded in urban space and civic identity. Through sustained discussion and independent research, participants develop methodological tools for analysing the social, political, and cultural work performed by representations of the past.
By the end of the course, students will be prepared to theorise medievalism across cultures and chronologies and to apply these frameworks to their own doctoral research, approaching history not only as an object of study but as a flexible and contested cultural material actively reshaped in the present.
- Teacher: Emilia Jamroziak