This analysis of the scientific and academic career of the Russian-Italian physicist Gleb Wataghin, founder of the physics course at the University of São Paulo, in the richest state of Brazil, in 1934, brings to light elements present in the formation of a scientific identity , which we characterize here as transnational. The methodological recourse to transnationalism is a cornerstone of our analysis, insofar as it was itself an integral part of Wataghin’s career, considering that he made foreign travel a systematic part of his approach and placed it at the disposal of his Brazilian students. Thanks to his training as a physicist and his membership in the international scientific community in the 1920s and ’30s, Wataghin brought to Brazil not just the latest topics on the physics agenda in the Northern Hemisphere, but also contacts that later enabled his students to spend time at institutions and laboratories run by renowned physicists. The scientific values and practices Wataghin transported to Brazil are discussed, as is the way he combined them with the values held dear by the São Paulo elite, responsible for planning and funding the university, who saw modern science as a symbol of erudition and a means by which to win back their political influence in Brazil, which they had lost in 1930 with the rise to power of a centralizing federal government.

In the 1850s, the American scientist and educator Frederick A. P. Barnard created a collection of scientific apparatus at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, of a size and expense that surpassed any collection in the United States at that time. The collection, which would come to include over three hundred instruments of both American and European manufacture, was the attempt by Barnard, born and educated in the North, to bring Big Science to the South and challenge the dominance of Northern schools in science education. In this respect it failed, and the collection became a forgotten footnote in the history of Southern science. This article examines the importance of the collection in understanding science at U.S. universities before the Civil War and what Barnard referred to as the "scientific atmosphere" of the South. The first section compares the collection to others of the period, highlighting its historical uniqueness and significance. The second section uses Barnard's correspondence to construct a narrative of the collection's assembly, providing insight into the international scientific instrument market of the period as well as the difficulties he faced working in the antebellum South. Finally, an examination of Barnard's perceptions regarding intellectual isolation and the failure of his endeavor highlights differences perceived by scientists of the day concerning the practice of science in the North versus in the South prior to the Civil War.