Our aim is to provide the first global study of transcultural knowledge production in the early modern age, by examining the development of academic disciplines within the international and multicultural environments in which they were taught and studied. The guiding idea is that the richest and most varied evidence of transcultural knowledge was provided by central-eastern European students migrating westwards. For the first time in the research of intellectual thought, the perspective of study which traditionally focuses on university academics will be reversed, concentrating on travelling students, seen as the knowledge agents.

By working across national cultures and disciplinary areas, this project will bridge knowledge and culture and offer a new example of how intellectual history can be (re-)written.

Based the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe (c. 1470-c. 1620)” will run for 5 years from November 2020 to October 2025.

Project number 864542.