Reading groups bring researchers together – from Bielefeld and well beyond – to read and debate current scholarship in an informal, collegial setting and to build lasting interdisciplinary and international networks around shared questions. Members of the Unit currently convene two reading groups, both meeting online and open to new participants:
Medievalism is the study of how the Middle Ages have been received, reworked and put to use in the centuries since – in politics, scholarship and popular culture. We run a reading group on medievalism, as well as related fields of reception studies, re-enactment studies and memory studies, based at Bielefeld University. Since February 2026 we have been meeting monthly to discuss key questions in medievalist theory and its various approaches. Members of the group come from Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries, and represent a range of fields, including history, archaeology, literary studies, Eastern European Studies, re-enactment studies, media studies, game studies, public history, and Scandinavian studies. New members from any discipline or career stage are welcome; to take part, please contact the organisers.
The reading list from our first season is available here.
This reading group emerged in January 2026 from Alexandra Kolesnik’s collaboration within the project Adjustment and Radicalisation: Dynamics in Popular Culture(s) in Pre-War Eastern Europe – a joint initiative by the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) and the Chair of Slavic Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam. We meet monthly to discuss recent theoretical scholarship on popular culture, and its responses to the transformations of modernity, including the reinterpretation and contestation of the past. Particular attention is paid to approaches and case studies within the field of Eastern European popular culture research. The group brings together researchers from Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Russia whose work focuses on contemporary literature, video games, online culture and vlogging, fashion, comics and graphic novels, stand-up comedy and popular music.
The reading list from our first season is available here.