The scientific objective of the Project is to significantly advance the study of mobility, understood as the movement of people, objects, ideas and texts in past and present societies as well as in different geographical contexts. Taking advantage of a rich and unique mix of disciplines, with a distinctive reference to the connections between past and present times (from antiquity to contemporaneity), the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities aims to contribute to the emerging area of mobility study through the humanities, which is increasingly pursued by other research hubs worldwide.

Technological and societal advancement have moved toward an increased interest in mobilities and their complexity. While this has been the object of a major involvement by the hard and social sciences, the humanities can play an equally important role in understanding mobility in a diachronic and spatial perspective. Thanks to a multifaceted conceptualisation of mobility, the availability of an ever-increasing amount of data, an expanding methodological creativity involving a variety of sources, and the convergence of social and humanities research, mobility studies today can bring together a multiplicity of movement-related phenomena in a single study program. Indeed, the study of movement-related processes is central to a diverse range of research topics and disciplinary domains at DiSSGeA.

This inclusive and plural approach will help in overcoming the traditional paradigm that reads past and present as static entities developing independently one from the other. The combination of historiographical, philological, geographical and anthropological methods, with a reference also to economic and legal aspects, allows better understanding of the dynamism of human societies and nonhuman entities, and to reconstruct in critical ways the related contexts, practices and experiences at different scales.

The project takes into consideration three areas of interest: