Sport in History

Katie talks to Barbara Horley about the Speedway's boom time from the 1930s to the 1960s. Barbara is a doctoral candidate at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. Barbara previously taught Philosophy and Religious Studies before deciding to pursue her PhD. Her research involves looking at speedway from its British inception in 1928 through to 1965 when...

This episode Katie talks to Margaret Roberts, the editor of the online magazine Playing Pasts. The magazine publishes 2 articles per week and gets 30,000 reads per month and so is a fantastic way for researchers to get their work into a public forum in a less formal and time-consuming way than publishing in an academic journal. The British Society of Sports History is now working in partnership wi...

Linda M. Perkins is Associate University Professor and director of Applied Gender Studies at Claremont Graduate University. She holds an interdisciplinary university appointment in the departments of Applied Gender Studies, Educational Studies, and History. Her primary areas of research are on the history of African-American women’s higher education, the education of African Americans in elite ins...

Emily Ankers talks to Katie about her research on women's experience of rock climbing from both a historical and sociological point of view. Emily is a postgraduate researcher, having completed her Masters by Research in 2020 titled 'Everyday' Women's Experiences of Rock Climbing (1970-2020) at Leeds Beckett University. Her research investigated how women's experiences of climbing have changed ove...

New podcast host Katie Taylor talks to Dr Verity Postlethwaite about her research on London 2012, researching in Japan in preparation for the Paralympics and Olympics and researching during the pandemic. Katie also tells us about the new BSSH PG/ECR Facebook group and a special pandemic grant available for researchers affected by the pandemic. Dr Verity Postlethwaite is an independent researcher b...

Shannon Walsh is an Associate Professor of Theatre History at LSU where she also serves as Co-Head of the PhD in Theatre. She received her MA from Florida State, and her PhD from the University of Minnesota. As a theatre practitioner she has worked as a dramaturg and a development manager. She has published in Theatre Annual and Theatre Journal and has recently published two books - Eugenics and P...

Lasse is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. His research interests include media studies, game studies, esport, play theory and phenomenology among other topics. The purpose of the present conversation was to discuss Lasse's latest article - The Play of Champions: Toward a Theory of Skill in eSport." Sport, Ethics and Philosophy (2020): 1-23. This podcast is a British Socie...

This week Geoff talks to two guests, Prof Matt Taylor and Dr Raf Nicholson, who have co-authored an article for the latest issue of the Society’s journal, Sport in History, 'Women, sport and the people’s war in Britain, 1939–45'.Geoff also catches up with Richard Boddie to talk about the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize which is awarded each year by the Society to recognise excellence in sport history...

Welcome to the Sport in History Podcast brought to you by the British Society of Sports History in association with the Institute of Historical Research. This episode Geoff talks to Katie Taylor about the history of women's American football which has its roots right back in the late nineteenth century. Katie describes how pioneering female college students took up the game and adapted it to their...

This episode Geoff is joined by the co-editors of a special isssue of the BSSH's journal Sport in History on women's sport. Fiona and Carol talk about the state of research into women's sport now, and how it has developed since their previous special issue on the subject in 2010.They also give us a sneak preview of some of the articles that they have gathered together, including a ground-breaking...

This episode Conor Heffernan talks to Conor Murray about sport in Ireland in the twentieth century and the way in which the histories of soccer and rugby are entwined with political developments on the island of Ireland. How and why did soccer and rugby develop in such contrasting ways? And what effect did the troubled relationship between Britain and Ireland have on crowd behaviour north and sout...

And we're back! After a break following the British Society of Sports History's virtual Conference the Sport in History podcast returns with an interview with Professor Dilwyn Porter of De Montfort University, who talks about his latest book, English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game which he has co-authored with Dr Chris Bolsmann. He talks about the Corinthia...

The final podcast from the BSSH 2020 Conference with a round table discussion on the future of Sports History. On the panel are Dr Christienna Fryar of Goldsmiths, University of London, Dr Geoff Levett, editor of the Sport in History podcast, Dr Carol Osborne of Sporting Heritage and Prof Kay Schiller, the Editor-in-Chief of the BSSH’s journal Sport in History. The four panellists give brief openi...

Sporting Inequalities is the subject of the fifth instalment from the BSSH 2020 Conference with a panel chaired by Dr Lisa Taylor which features three young researchers looking into women’s sport, representations of women in manga, and disability sport. In Women’s Rugby: the relationship between women’s sport and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain Lydia Furse of De Montfort University prov...

It’s the keynote in the fourth instalment from the BSSH 2020 Conference as we hear previous podcast guest Dr Prashant Kidambi deliver a wide-ranging Sir Derek Birley Memorial lecture on the writing of sports history. Informed by CLR James’s classic text Beyond the Boundary Prashant discusses the boundary in sports history – both as a literal dividing line and as a metaphor for ways of thinking abo...

The Writing of HIstory is the subject of the third panel from the BSSH’s 2020 Conference, chaired by Dr Nick Piercey, with a wide ranging discussion between scholars researching in a variety of fields. In A ‘better attendance than usual’: Deconstructing the History of Sport and Recreation at Port Sunlight Samuel Clevenger of Towson University questions the benevolence of model communities and whet...

Boxing history in the second in a series of podcasts brought to you from the BSSH’s 2020 Conference, which was held online in the last week of August. The session is introduced by Matt McDowell of the University of Edinburgh and features Ben Duncan-Jones (De Montfort University) with a paper titled, ‘[T]he advantage of science, and of the affinity which exists between the natural and the artificia...

This is the first in a series of podcasts brought to you from the BSSH’s 2020 Conference, which was held online in the last week of August. The first panel is introduced by BSSH Chair Dr Raf Nicholson and chaired by Dr Conor Heffernan and features two papers by leading British sports historians, Professor Martin Polley of De Montfort University and Dr Luke Harris of the University of Birmingham ta...

Cricket this week with Nigel Hancock, who is the Chair of the Cricket Society. Nigel is the Chair of the Cricket Society, a well-regarded member organisation that exists to promote cricket in all its spheres – that is listening, reading, watching and playing. In particular, it has a regularly published Journal and bulletin; puts on live meetings with cricketers and the people who write about them;...

The history of sports chaplaincy this episode with Conor Heffernan talking to Will Whitmore, who is currently completing a PhD at the University of Gloucester. Will’s PhD focuses on the role of sports chaplains in professional sports teams in a comparative study between soccer in the UK and American sports. He describes the special role that sports chaplains in the UK play in clubs’ relationships...

The history of Physical Culture with Dr Conor Heffernan of the University of Texas at Austin talking about his research into physical culture in Ireland in the twentieth century, as well as the history of weightlifting and the search for the 1000lb bench press. There’s chat about Sinn Fein’s trash-talking of the English physique in the 1900s and an insight into the use of tennis balls and tight to...

Olympic and Paralympic History on this podcast with a recording of an online symposium sponsored jointly by the British Library, the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University and the British Society for Sports History. The event was chaired by Dr. Raf Nicholson with four speakers talking about different aspects of researching the history of the Games. Presentati...

Irish soccer history this week with Conor Heffernan talking to Dr Conor Curran, who is Dublin City Council’s official football historian. Conor talks about his ground-breaking study of sport in Donegal which was publish as The Development of Sport in Donegal, 1880-1935 in 2015. He also talks about the oral histories he conducted when writing about the experience of Irish migrant footballers in the...

Sport and the Cold War is the focus for this week’s episode with Geoff talking to Dr Heather Dichter of the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Montfort University. There were some technical issues on Geoff’s side but do persevere, the sound quality gets better! It was a wide-ranging discussion in which Heather talked about her latest publications, the first being an article f...

This podcast it’s the history of black college basketball in the twentieth century with Raja Rahim, who is currently researching a PhD at the University of Florida. Her study focuses on the way in which participation in basketball gave agency to young African American men and women by using allow them to use the structure of sports organisation and participation to express themselves in the public...