Victoria Jackson, PhD, is co-director of the Great Game Lab. She is a sports historian and clinical associate professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Victoria is a publicly-engaged scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of sport and society and explores how the games we play (and watch) tell us much about the communities – local, national, and global – in which we live. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, Letras Libres (Mexico), El Universal (Mexico), Época (Brazil), The Independent (UK), The Athletic, and Sportico. Victoria has appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss American college sports issues and is a frequent podcast, radio, TV, and documentary film commentator.
Victoria brings a historian's eye to projects of designing optimized, healthy sports systems and is deeply engaged in sports policy work. Outside the U.S. she has advised sports clubs, universities, and nonprofits on building cultures and creating mechanisms of gender equity. Inside the U.S. she has worked to bridge the gap between two major sports policy projects: the redesign of American college sports and the overhaul of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Movement. She has testified on Capitol Hill twice, at the top of the 2023 public hearing of the Commission on the State of the U.S. Olympics and Paralympics to set the historical stage and the current stakes, and in a 2024 Hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Innovation, Data & Commerce on college sports proposed legislation.
Victoria leads the Sport Humanities at ASU, co-directs Sports @ HI (an initiative of the Humanities Institute), and teaches a package of sports history courses, which forms part of an interdisciplinary, liberal arts undergraduate certificate in “sports, cultures, and ethics." She is affiliated faculty with the American Studies program in the School of Social Transformation and a former Global Sport Scholar with the Global Sport Institute at ASU. She also serves on advisory boards of nonprofits with missions focused on sport and social change, and is a director of the Phoenix Women’s Sports Association, a nonprofit organization with the mission of helping underserved girls in metro Phoenix find their power through sport.
She holds MA and PhD degrees from Arizona State University, and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she graduated summa cum laude and joined Phi Beta Kappa. Victoria was also a cross country and track and field athlete for UNC and ASU, Pac-10 conference champion at 5,000 meters, NCAA national champion for the Sun Devils at 10,000 meters, and a professional runner endorsed by Nike. Victoria works with Sun Devil Athletics on a variety of history, education, and leadership initiatives with athletes, coaches, administrators, and the greater Sun Devil community. She would like for her ASU school record in the 5,000 meters to be broken as soon as possible… but she will do everything in her power to keep her household’s 5,000m record.
Favorite sports memory?
Playing: long runs on South Mountain in Phoenix with ASU teammates. Watching: losing my voice screaming at the Michigan – Washington 1993 Rose Bowl with my dad.
Your global sports Mount Rushmore?
Billie Jean King, Pelé, Marta, Allyson Felix.
Which world leader would you put in goal?
Angela Merkel, Queen of Clean Sheets.
Which athlete would you want to be world leader?
Julie Foudy.
Best rivalry?
Sifan Hassan vs. the limits of the human body.
A sign that the world of sport is shrinking?
My college-football-obsessed parents (Michigan dad and Ohio State mom) now are also getting into the other football… so much so that they went to a Chelsea-Wrexham game at UNC’s football stadium (thanks Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney).
Where would the Great Game Lab find the quintessence of global sport?
A soccer practice at virtually any top club (or American college program) and, for the most part, anywhere in the world. You’d witness athletes from a dozen or so different countries communicating in the language of soccer, and a mix of the languages that are most widespread among the group.
Question you'd most want to ask other fellows?
What has sport helped you learn about yourself that you might never have discovered otherwise?