Cultures and Institutions in Motion (2008-2010)

Rewinding paper from reel, 1936. U.S. National Archives.

During the academic years 2008/09 and 2009/10, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies focused 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?

Topics Included:

  • Transnational history
  • 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
  • The creation of translocal networks and intermediaries

Davis Center Fellows

2008-2009

  • Celia Applegate, University of Rochester
  • Thomas Bender, New York University
  • April Masten, SUNY, Stony Brook
  • Susan Pennybacker, Trinity College
  • Mimi Sheller, Swarthmore College
  • Robert Stam, New York University
  • David J. Wasserstein, Vanderbilt University
  • Nira Wickramasinghe, University of Colombo

2009-2010

  • Michael David-Fox, University of Maryland
  • Petra Goedde, Temple University
  • Elena Iseyev, University of Exeter
  • Thomas Lekan, University of South Carolina
  • Mary Nolan, New York University
  • Dorothy Noyes, Ohio State University
  • Jocelyn Olcott, Duke University
  • Pamela Smith, Columbia University

Shelby Cullom Davis Center Volume

Cultures in Motion Edited by Daniel Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz

Cultures in Motion

Edited by Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz
Copyright 2013 Princeton University Press