Consider what might be gained if the powerful claims of soil, roots, and territory could be set aside (Paul Gilroy) How is proximity experienced today? (Okwui Enwezor) In a contribution to a wide-ranging discussion on the current state of comparative literature, Doris Sommer proposes a period of what she calls 'Study Abroad at home' for students of world literature, where they would spend time living with migrant communities in their local areas. The aim, Sommer writes, would be to offer an experience of intercultural cohabitation to equip them "to engage as readers in today's world" and to actualize the promise of becoming the "global citizens" often touted as the happy outcome of university programs. Interestingly, Sommer envisions the intercultural encounter as leading to better or more culturally expansive and genealogically inventive practices of reading, implicitly reinforcing the value of humanistic study as students learn to 'think and feel beyond their inherited frameworks' (2015). Although in this instance she is addressing directly the discipline of comparative literature, her remarks have profound implications for departments of modern languages, whose study abroad programs have conventionally allowed students to travel to sometimes quite distant places to deepen their knowledge of the language and culture they study through closer acquaintance in situ. The distance travelled in many respects has occupied a structural or ideological role as well as a pragmatic obstacle within modern languages, underlining the belief in a clear separation between distinct cultures. Traditionally, the discipline has worked on a spatial model. 1 Yet in "today's world" such a clear-cut division of languages and cultures is palpably untenable. In Scotland, from where I am writing, Polish, for example, is the second most widely-spoken language, and Spanish, which now

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Andrews. He has published extensively on Modern Italian literature and film especially in relation to sexuality and Italian (post)colonial culture. His current interests are in the field of transnational Italian culture. He is co-editor of the book series 'Transnationalizing Italian Cultures' with Liverpool University Press, and co-editor of Transnational Modern Languages: A Handbook also with LUP.