Tag: John Harney
Summer Research
Professors do not get summers off, at least not typically. Even at a teaching-focused institution like Centre College, research forms an important part of our professional lives, and given the strong focus on teaching the summer often presents the best opportunity to get some research done. As a direct result of that, I spent my ...
The Fall Approaches
Yet another blog post written with the hulking specter of all the blog posts I haven’t written this summer sitting behind me, rather pointedly not saying anything. Still, here we are, back again. I am excited about the autumn, with one of my favourite classes, “Creating the Orient”, making a comeback. Last time I taught ...
Chasing History: Industrialization and Sport
This past spring, I taught a class on Popular Sport & the Modern World, with a pretty wide brief… the basic outlines of the class held our discussions to the mid-nineteenth century and later, but we read and discussed topics from the emergence of association football in industrial England to segregation in American baseball to ...
Popular Sport and the Modern World
We are coming to the end of the term here at Centre College, with commencement only a few days away. This semester has proved to be very, very busy for us here. I have been completely wrapped up in my new class “Popular Sport and the Modern World.” I had buckets of fun, and was ...
Futebol Nation
This week in my class on popular sport and the modern world, we are discussing Brazilian soccer. In particular, we are moving towards discussions of cultural representations of “samba football” within and outside of Brazil. Our reading, Howard Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation, makes some fascinating arguments about the connections between the evolution and celebration of Brazilian ...
The West’s Awake
Last week in my class on the history of popular sport in the modern world, we looked at Gaelic Games and the interaction of sport and nationalist identity in twentieth century Ireland. Following from previous weeks, when we discussed how segregation mitigated baseball’s claim to being the American Pastime and manifestations of religious tensions in ...
The Power of Words: Xi Jinping’s Show of Force
The Chinese Communist Party has made major news across the planet in the last week, after removing term limits from the positions of president and vice president (though Chinese leader Xi Jinping is not actually “president”, that title more a result of convenience in English translation). The move has generated enormous interest in the Western ...
