A Global History of Sport: The research/teaching nexus

Please join us on the 28^th November 6.30pm-8pm Level 5 Seminar Room, Australian Hearing Hub for a discussion co-organised by the Centre for Applied History and the Sydney Chapter of the Association of Sports History (light catering will be provided).

Please rsvp for catering purposes: tanya.evans@mq.edu.au

In Semester 1 2020 Keith Rathbone and Tanya Evans are looking forward to teaching a new unit on the history of sport in the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University. As the unit guide suggests: In all its varieties, sport comes as close to a universal human experience as any other activity. The reach of association football, for example, dwarfs all major religions and political empires. “A Global History of Sport” will draw on wide-ranging inter-disciplinary teaching and research strengths across the university providing historical insight and understanding to the popularity of association football, the refoundation of the Olympics, state biopolitics, the global rise of sport science, health and medical sciences, the fitness industry, and the mediatization of sport in the contemporary world. It will demonstrate the significance and meanings of sport in varied national contexts and across different class, racial, gender, and ethnic groups including AFL and swimming in Australia, the international Olympic movement, association football in South America and Africa, college football in the United States, and the rise of female, LGBT, and transgender athletes.

Tanya will talk about how her recent oral history research on female athletes for the State Library of NSW feeds into her teaching of the new unit and the broader relationship between public history and sport history.

Keith will talk about the first go around of the unit at Macquarie University, its successes and failures, and how he will further integrate his recent research on authoritarianism, liberalism and sport into the class.

Bios:

Associate Professor Tanya Evans is Director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University where she teaches in the Department of Modern History. Her books include the prize-winning Fractured Families: Life On The Margins in Colonial New South Wales (New South, 2015); Swimming with the Spit, 100 Years of the Spit Amateur Swimming Club (New South, 2016); with Pat Thane, Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Unmarried Motherhood in Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2012) and 'Unfortunate Objects': Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). She also curates exhibitions and works as a consultant for television production companies making historical documentaries. She is currently finishing a book on the history of motherhood in Australia (working in collaboration with family historians), comparing the practice and meanings of family history in Australia, England and Canada and undertaking collaborative work with family and local historians on an archaeological project in the Blue Mountains.

Dr Keith Rathbone teaches European and Sports history at Macquarie University where he also researches twentieth century French social and cultural history. His manuscript, entitled A Nation in Play: Physical Culture, the State, and Society during France's Dark Years, 1932-1948, examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. In investigating physical culture, he addresses historiographic issues such as the continuity between the Third Republic and the Vichy Regime, the gendered ideology of Vichy sports programs, and the development of collaboration and resistance.