Courses

This course dives deep into critical issues in the modern Olympic and Paralympic Games, like nationalism and internationalism, idealism, violence and peace, human rights and social justice, amateur and professional sport, elite performance and the transcendence of human limitations, ethics, entertainment and mega-event production, and ideas about the imagined global community. We explore the International Olympic Committee, sports governing bodies, and the principles of Olympism as products of the turn of the twentieth century. We analyze the ways in which the Games provide a window into the host nation’s local history as well as its ideals and ambitions. Finally, we look at how Olympian and Paralympian bodies carry layers of identity and meaning that conflict, contradict, remain, and change over time.

This course examines the international politics of global sport, the ways in which nation-states use sport to advance their domestic and foreign agendas and accumulate reputational capital. Because of sport's mass popularity and power to help forge social cohesion and a sense of a shared identity, great and emerging powers have long sought to distinguish themselves not only in high-profile athletic competitions, but also in the hosting of such contests. Students come to appreciate how international sport constitutes an important front for public diplomacy and geopolitical rivalries, and consider the ensuing challenges of designing representative governing bodies such as the IOC and FIFA for global sport. The course also looks at the unprecedented moves nation-states are engaging in to acquire permanent ownership stakes in international sport, with students assessing what is behind these moves, and how they impact how America itself connects to the rest of the world through sport.

This course explores the second half of the U.S. history survey (post-Civil War to the present) through the lens of sport. Students examine the historical and contemporary relationships between sport and society, identity, community, media, capitalism, and education. The course looks at the process through which the equal opportunity to participate in school sports became defined as a civil right, and, more recently, a human right. Students construct definitions of sport as play, labor, exercise, education, and fitness for citizenship, and discover how these overlapping definitions change across time and space.

Student-controlled intercollegiate contests quickly transformed into big-time college sports by the early twentieth century, revolutionizing the sports industry in the United States as well as the landscape of higher education. The American college sports enterprise is unique; nowhere else in the world does a large, amateur, multi-billion-dollar system of school sports exist. After an exploration of the origins of intercollegiate athletics and the creation of the modern National Collegiate Athletic Association, topics covered in this course include the desegregation of predominantly white universities, sports at historically black colleges and universities, women’s intercollegiate athletics, the big business of the ideology of amateurism, international athletes in U.S. college sports, and scandal and reform. Students place today’s often-controversial topics in the context of the long history of the NCAA and broader societal context.

This course looks at how and why sports cross borders, and the ways in which sport fandom connects people to each other, their geography, and their own identity.  Students come to appreciate the soft power of sport that politicians, nation-states, and corporate brands leverage to their advantage. The industry of sport has been among globalization’s most stalwart disciples; students learn how the world of sport has been shrinking, with games crossing more and more boundaries, making of its athletes, fans, and stakeholders, citizens of the world. Likewise, the course encourages students to think of sport culture from a more cosmopolitan, more globalized, perspective.

This course uses the 1968 Olympic moment as a launchpad to explore United States, Mexican, and global history, with a special thematic focus on social activism and athlete activism. The year 1968 was momentous for a number of overlapping reasons that came together at the Games. Looking to mid-twentieth-century Mexico, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and Mexico City Organizing Committee sought to use the first Olympic Games held outside the “First World”—and first to be live-broadcasted, in color—to showcase the new, modern Mexico. Just days before the Opening Ceremonies, however, the PRI government greenlighted the mass killing of hundreds of Mexican student activists and bystanders in what is now called the Tlatelolco Massacre. African American athletes from the United States used the Olympic platform to bring attention to racial injustice in the United States and around the globe. The Cold War politics of the Games played out in the medals race, and athletic shoe companies exploited the politics of amateurism in the battle for athlete brand endorsements. Beyond the Games and the world of sport, 1968 became more than a calendar year, but a movement. Our course will be organized around three overlapping themes: “world on fire,” “sports and politics,” and “then and now.”

This course explores the history of baseball as the history of America since the game’s origins in the early nineteenth century. Students examine critical issues in baseball’s past, including war, democracy, equality, social mobility, modernity, industrial labor relations, leisure and entertainment, racial segregation, and ideas about manliness and physical prowess. Jackie Robinson’s place in the history of baseball—indeed, the history of America—is a major theme. Students also look at baseball’s exportation by sporting entrepreneurs and religious organizations. Topics and assignments in this course ask students to pay special attention to ideas and structures concerning race, ethnicity, nationality, social class, gender, and religious identity.