The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
The academic treatment for English-speakers who get that soccer is more than gamedays, stars and goals. Who wonder about the histories, subcultures and politics that make the game so different from many American sports cultures; and who care about a critical take on soccer as a global capitalist machine. A European-guided journey, with one expert "visiting professor" each episode.
The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.
Teaching Soccer: Three Actual Professors of Football on their College Classes, and Soccer Literacy in the U.S.
It's the first episode with American guests - and the first one with three of them. For this episode of The Assistant Professor of Football, I am joined by three (real) professors who regularly teach, in American university classrooms, about football - its culture, its meaning, its history. We talked about how that teaching is going, what would it be like to take a class with them, what do they assign, and how did they get into this subject in academia in the first place, and what good books are being written about the beautiful game beyond the well-known popular ones. And then we went on to opine more broadly, about the future of the game globally as well as here in the US, the next World Cup, why awful people run clubs, and what makes the beautiful game such a unique angle to understand the world.
These guests are:
- Dr. Brenda Elsey (Hofstra University, History Department), co-editor of Football and the Boundaries of History: Critical Studies in Soccer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and author of Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2019)
- Dr. Peter Alegi (Michigan State University, Department of History), author of African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World's Game (Ohio University Press, 2010) and Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa (University of KawZulu-Natal Press, 2004); founder of The Football Scholars Forum
- Dr. Pablo M. Sierra (University of Rochester, Department of History), author of Urban Slavery in Colonial Mexico: Puebla de los Ángeles, 1531-1706 (Cambridge Press, 2018)
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/