| Funding organisation | British Academy, United Kingdom |
| Funding period | 2017-2019 |
| Principal investigator | Heike Jöns |
| Research universities in the United States had superseded those in Germany as global centers of science and scholarship by 1945. In addition to wider economic, socio-cultural, and geopolitical shifts, their main competitive advantages have been identified as corporate autonomy, non-professional education as their primary goal, and the institutionalization of research sabbaticals (Rüegg 2004, 12; Jöns, 2008, 361). This research aims to create new knowledge and understanding about the nature of US research universities by examining the origins, development, and changing geographies of research sabbaticals in two of the emerging hegemonic US institutions. Based on original archival research at Harvard University (est. 1636), where regular research leaves were institutionalized for the first time in 1880, and the University of California (est. 1868), the first public US university that introduced a sabbatical leave scheme, this research investigates how the creation of regular research sabbaticals shaped modern research cultures across the sciences and the humanities and contributed to making US research universities central nodes in global knowledge networks between 1776 and 1970. As part of this research project, it was possible to interview the first academic ombuds of the University of California system on their experiences and contributions. This interview enabled a collaborative article on the ways in which institutionalized academic advocacy shaped an evolving empowering university for students, faculty, and staff in Berkeley during the turbulent student protests of the academic years 1968/69 and 1969/70 (Jöns, Adriansen, and Nielsen, 2026). | |
| Publications | Heike Jöns, Hanne Kirstine Adriansen, Gritt B. Nielsen 2026. Transformational geographies of academic advocacy: How the first ombuds in the University of California shaped an empowering university in Berkeley, 1968–1970. Journal of Historical Geography 93: 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2026.07.001 |