Princeton University

During the academic years 2008/09 and 2009/10, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will focus on the problem of cultures and institutions in motion.   How have ideas, institutions, structures, and artifacts moved across social and geographical space?   How have they intersected with their new environments?   How have they been adapted, resituated, hybridized, and transformed in processes of motion?   The field of inquiry includes transnational history but is not limited to it.   Problems could include the diffusion of religious and cultural practices, the migration of technologies and objects, the circulation of ideas, traditions, and aesthetic forms, the transfer of policies and legal practices, the dynamics of traveling social movements, histories of reception, appropriation, and encounter, and the creation of translocal networks and intermediaries.   As in the past, we hope to address this problem from a wide variety of periods and places, from prehistory to the present and from all parts of the world.