Convenors: Dean W. Bond (Loughborough University) and Heike Jöns (Loughborough University)

Universities in the tradition of the first degree-awarding universitas magistrorum et scholarium in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford have shaped the formation of European societies since the Middle Ages. The early modern period saw a proliferation of the European university model in other parts of the world, making universities a truly global institution since the early twentieth century. As centres for learning, teaching, and the production of academic knowledge and expertise, universities have generated diverse mobilities of students, graduates, and scholars; ideas, discourses, and knowledge; and diverse non-human material resources. This session aims to analyse the resulting historical geographies of the university as an exciting new research agenda at the intersection of geography, history, science studies, and cognate fields.

We invite papers on a range of topics relating to the multi-scalar geographies of the university as a physical site, epistemological space, and socio-material network. Topics might include:

-Student and academic mobilities, ranging from career migration to research travel.
-The relations between universities, academies, and learned societies.
-Historical geographies of higher learning traditions and curricula within and outside Europe.
-Universities and the geographies of colonialism and decolonisation.
-Universities and the production of geographical knowledge.
-Universities and knowledge networks at different scales.
-Universities in relation to towns, cities, regions, and the state.
-Historical geographies of university-government-business interaction.
-Historical geographies of internationalisation and globalisation of the university.
-Historical geographies of university expansion and contraction.
-Universities in the context of wars, conflicts, protests, and strikes.
-Historical geographies of academic ceremony, reputation, and prestige.
-Historical geographies of university governance, faculties, and disciplines.
-Sites of knowledge production, transfer, and exchange within universities.
-Geographies of gender and race in the academy.

Please send an abstract of 200-250 words (for a paper of c. 15-20 minutes) to d.w.bond@lboro.ac.uk and h.jons@lboro.ac.uk by Friday, 29 September 2017. For more details on the International Conference of Historical Geographers in Warsaw from 15 to 20 July 2018, see http://ichg2018.uw.edu.pl/.