Carla Heelan is a PhD student in history at Harvard University. She works on Germany’s medieval imaginary, a range of concepts and practices engaging with a sometimes historical, often imagined, medieval past. Although the medieval past rose to new prominence in Germany during the nineteenth century (1815–1914), the Medieval was no neutral historical reference point. Her research examines how medievalism bears on questions of nationalism and modernity, articulated in terms of historicism, aesthetics, social thought, and law. Heelan seeks to understand how the medieval imaginary transcended intellectual debates and came to influence the very structure of modern Germany across cultural registers.
This information is accurate for the time period that the scholar is affiliated with CES.
