Methodological reflection is essential for a collaborative endeavor that embraces such a large variety of approaches, localities and time spans. We strive to create a platform for an ongoing conversation about the method and theory of global intellectual history. The following three areas appear to be of concern for most potential projects to be pursued within the graduate school:

1. Local resources
   Times of crisis or moments of increased cultural production often lead to a mobilization of local and indigenous traditions. Instead of dismissing it as a sign of powerful cultural path dependencies, we will have to ask to what extent the recourse on tradition can be understood precisely as an answer to globally induced ruptures and caesuras.

2. Local appropriations
   A non-Eurocentric intellectual history will have to break with the assumption that cultural transfer in the modern period was essentially a diffusion of Western concepts and values. The program of the school affirms the multidirectionality of intellectual exchange and seeks to reconstruct (local and global) constellations that made ideas appear relevant and worth taking up instead of privileging origins and moments of first discovery.

3. Responses to global structures
   To what extent can the emergence or appropriation of ideas, concepts and discourses be understood as a response to structural change on the global level? Such a perspective would allow us to describe the appearance of radically new ideas that derived their persuasiveness not from transfers or legacy cultural resources, but from the innovative way in which they reacted to global challenges.