The post-doctoral fellowship will be devoted primarily to the production of a monograph from the Fellow's PhD thesis. The central theme of the thesis is academic mobility, which is subjected to critical scrutiny through narrative biographic inquiry into the lived experience of Russian academics who have chosen to leave their homelands. The research discusses the factors that prompt mobility; the relationship between place or space of origin and new location, between disciplinary formation and new contexts, between established networks and new connections.

The research contributes to interdisciplinary perspectives on the academy by connecting issues of disciplinary and cultural formation to issues of national identity and career formation. Additional research in the Fellowship period will make connection to Europeanisation in higher education. The research will therefore attract the attention of policy-makers at different levels who have an interest in the changing nature of the academy in the new knowledge economy, and its European identity. Because of its interdisciplinary nature it will be of interest to scholars of international/comparative education, national identity and diaspora studies, Russian/Slavic studies, and biographic interpretative research.

November 2008 - October 2009