International Academic Mobility and Migrations in Contemporary History: An Overview on Existing Studies

The Peregrinatio academica has been a key feature in European intellectual history, and has maintained its importance in the reshaping of cultural relations after the making of European nation states. In dealing with the last two centuries, however, historians dedicated their attention almost exclusively to the participation of the representatives of high culture to the process of nation building. Therefore, they often reduced the whole phenomenon of academic mobility to some of its specific elements, such as the forced migration of intellectuals and the political use of universities, which often made both students and scholars the tools of "cultural diplomacy". Several other aspects of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century intellectual mobility, such as the circulation of ideas and of the methods of academic knowledge, as well as the professional role and social behaviour of academic personnel abroad, have been instead neglected, although they were central for both medieval and early modern studies. Some recent books are showing a reversal of this trend. This review article aims to place their acquisitions against the backward of a complex "state-of-the-art".

Keywords: Cultural exchanges, cultural diplomacy, higher education, intellectual and academic mobility, migrations, university students

Andrea Mariuzzo, Migrazioni e spostamenti internazionali di studenti e personale accademico nell’età contemporanea: un quadro degli studi in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 1/2015, pp 137-154, DOI: 10.3280/MON2015-001005