This paper examines how academic travel and expertise shaped the development of research cultures in US universities. The focus is on a critical interrogation of the question what the research practices and travels of individual professors reveal about the wider geographical trajectories of knowledge production, exchange, and networks at Harvard University. This question gains particular significance when considering that Harvard is the first known US university that institutionalised the right to take regular sabbatical leave for its academics in 1880 and that both this university and its sabbatical scheme have been widely emulated internationally (Eells 1962; Jöns 2008). Based on my archival research in a British Academy project (2017-2019), I compare the geographical biographies of two highly controversial earth scientists – Louis Agassiz and William Morris Davis – with wider trends in the development of American research cultures (Livingstone 1987). The analysis focuses on the time between the publication of Agassiz’ Études sur Les Glaciers (1840) in Switzerland, via his professorial career in Cambridge, MA, between 1847 and 1873 (Irmscher 2013), to the research and travels of physical geographer William Morris Davis, who worked at Harvard from 1877 to 1912 (Chorley, Beckinsale & Dunn 1973). Comparing Agassiz’ and Davis’ travels to wider research cultures not only helps to understand the epistemological complexities and controversies resulting from both the similarities and differences of their geographical trajectories to that of previous research travellers but also underline the need for more critical reflections of imperial and racist disciplinary histories (Livingstone 1992; Driver 2001; Blunt & McEwan 2002). Moreover, I argue that critical geographical histories of research and travel enrich interdisciplinary knowledge about the formation of research universities and globally highly uneven knowledge networks in science and scholarship.
Mots clés : geography of science|academic mobility|research culture|knowledge production|history of geography
A104421HJ