Olga Sparschuh

Travelling Titles: Imported Doctorates and Educational Protectionism in a Globalizing World, 1890-1920. From the end of the 19th century, rapid globalization led to an increase in transatlantic educational mobility. While many American medical students went to the major faculties in Vienna and Berlin to complete their studies, at the same time numerous Austrian and German dental students went to the United States to benefit from advances in dentistry. Given the lack of knowledge about foreign education systems and institutions, this juxtaposed student mobility presented the authorities in Austria-Hungary, the German Reich and the United States with the problem of validating and recognizing the doctorates that had been obtained abroad. The project “Travelling Titles: Imported Doctorates and Educational Protectionism in a Globalizing World, 1890-1920” is based on the hypothesis that the increased international student mobility opened a space of possibility between individual aspirations, assessment differences and fraudulent practices, which led to the national and international regulation of educational qualifications in the long term. The Botstiber Research Grant will support important research in archives in Washington DC, Philadelphia and Boston to shed light on the beginnings of mass student mobility and contribute to our understanding of the validation of foreign qualifications, lending historical depth to debates on foreign certificates in the current phase of educational globalization.