Next dossier to be published in CHDJ 2024, Vol. 13, No. 1

Transfers and cultural diplomacy in a global campus: new studies in university history. Scientific editors: Carolina Rodríguez-López and Francisco Morente Valero.

The history of universities is a fruitful historiographical field that has paid special attention to the legal history of the institution (foundational laws and internal operating rules). It has also focused on the impact of national political processes on university structures and on the organization of personnel and knowledge, and, more recently, on the biographies of the academics and students who attended and worked in the universities. Our project assumes the previous investigations and tries to overcome the national lines and their specific problems to put university exchanges and experiences in a global and entangled framework. This special issue for Culture and History is devoted to the study of cultural transfers and diplomacy that had the university and the campus as its main stage. That includes circulation of ideas and authors, residences and dorms for international students, programs of international visits and exchanges and international networks for the planning and promotion of special model and university projects.

The topic is investigated from the perspective of Transnational history in the classic sense inaugurated by K. Patel. We will also include the glance by G. Lingelbach and W. Schmale on cultural transfers, comparative history and agents of cultural transfers. Following Michel Espagne, we understand the concept of cultural transfer (Kulturtransfer) as “the transformations that take place during the transmission of concepts, norms, images and representations of one culture in another. Such transmissions can be carried out through migration but also through encounters or reading a text from another culture”. We understand university as an international and global campus and spaces for interprofessional visits, scientific exchanges and the celebration of cultural events and academic diplomacy.

This volume explores the transatlantic embassies, the circulation and transfer of Machiavelli ideas in Europe and the Americas, the political and academic relations between Germany and the University Falangism, the scientific projects of Del Amo Foundation in Spanish Universities, the students from Eastern Europe in Spain in Franco's times and the debates on joining and remaining in NATO among Spanish Academics.

Commencement ceremonies, 1915. USC Libraries Special Collections.