If sport provides a powerful lens through which social norms are produced, reproduced, and challenged, sports media compose key mechanisms through which these meanings are built and communicated. As studies of sports media gain momentum in the humanities and social sciences, this field-defining series will feature humanistic research that explores and critiques sports media’s significance, uses, and power.
Studies in Sports Media will bridge the gap between media studies and sports studies by paying attention to sport’s history, politics and particularities while probing the industrial, political, commercial, and aesthetic contexts that shape media’s production, circulation, and consumption. Books in the series will make important scholarly interventions while exhibiting the clarity, accessibility, and liveliness that nonacademic audiences expect.
Humanistic approaches to sports media analyze media industry, text, and public engagement in historic context. From “traditional” broadcast outlets to “new” media applications, sports media represent a rare site of broad public struggle over questions of community and identity. From the constant churn of SportsCenter to smartphone apps and talk radio, to team logo-wear as haute couture, fantasy gaming, and league appeals to corporate citizenship, sports media are an increasingly inescapable part of everyday life.
The series’ editors encourage submissions that present humanistic approaches to the study of sports media as provocative and significant interventions by which to consider historic and contemporary questions of community, identity, “interactivity” and engagement, industry, text and context.
Single-authored monographs and edited collections will be considered for inclusion in the series.
Inquiries and proposals can be sent to Daniel Nasset: dnassett@uillinois.edu
SERIES EDITORS
Victoria E. Johnson is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she is also affiliated faculty in African American Studies. Her publications focus on U.S. television history, cultural geography, and critical race theory with current work examining the cultural history of U.S. television through the lens of sports media, and the marketing of sports culture to a post-Title IX generation of women. http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=4927
Travis Vogan is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. His research focuses on the intersections among U.S. sports media’s cultural history, industrial contours, and institutional politics. He is the author of Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (2014) and ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire (2015). http://clas.uiowa.edu/sjmc/people/travis-vogan
