This article considers the role of overseas academic travel in the development of the modern research university, with particular reference to the University of Cambridge from the 1880s to the 1950s. The Cambridge academic community, relatively sedentary at the beginning of this period, became progressively more mobile and globalized through the early twentieth century, facilitated by regular research sabbaticals. The culture of research travel diffused at varying rates, and with differing consequences, across the arts and humanities and the field, laboratory (...) and theoretical sciences, reshaping disciplinary identities and practices in the process. The nature of research travel also changed as the genteel scholarly excursion was replaced by the purposeful, output-orientated expedition. (shrink)