The Centre for Advanced Studies brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines working on the history of migration and mobility in Europe and the Mediterranean between 250 and 900 CE. Migration and mobility fundamentally shaped this period. By raising new questions and exploring innovative approaches and methods for answering them, the Centre aims to set the scholarly debate of the phenomenon on a new footing:

• In the last decades scholarly debate about late antique and early medieval migrations has centered around questions of ethnicity and identity. The Centre aims to broaden the debate by embedding the mobility of ethnically defined groups in the wider history of migration and mobility at the time.
• In particular, the Centre looks beyond the migration of large ethnic or military groups and analyzes it in the context of other phenomena of individual and collective mobility in the period.
• The Centre widens the traditional boundaries of the so-called “migration period” (ca. 375-568) to examine pertinent phenomena from the 3rd to the 9th century CE.
• The Centre aims to add new or neglected aspects to the scholarly debate by bringing in the economic framework of migration and mobility as well as analyzing their consequences for local communities.
• The Centre analyzes migration and mobility in the period from a comparative historical perspective and draws on approaches and insights from research on mobility and migration in contemporary societies.

By pursuing this approach, the Centre aims to achieve results that can be used for research on migration and mobility in other periods, including those in present-day societies. At the same time, the Centre wants to test conceptualizations of migration and mobility developed with regard to modern societies on the basis of a paradigmatic historical precedent. In so doing, the Centre seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of a phenomenon of utmost political, social, economic, and cultural significance in the contemporary world.

The Centre for Advanced Studies is connected with other projects of Late Antiquity in Tuebingen through Forum Late Antiquity.