Abstract

The article illustrates and discusses some findings from a research in progress on "Gramscian studies" as a transnational intellectual formation. Specifically, it features results of a co-word analysis conducted on a large corpus of bibliographic data extracted from the Gramscian Bibliography (BG), an electronic database created, updated and managed by the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome. The contribution of the article is twofold: 1) it proposes an approach for detecting and measuring the global spread of an author's ideas focusing on the titles of the pertinent literature; 2) it provides a semantic map of the development of Gramscian studies in Italian and English languages for decades since the 50s. The final objective of the article (and the wider research it belongs to) is to make a case for an empirically grounded sociology of «Gramscism» as a global intellectual phenomenon.