Sports as Sites of Learning & Contestation - A Conversation with Prof. Frank Andre Guridy

We often overlook sports as a site of learning, but it’s a massive part of so many people’s lives, whether playing, supporting, watching or teaching. And simultaneously, all of life happens in and around the sports arena. It is humanity in our most beautiful and, sometimes, ugliest manifestations. With all of the global sporting events happening right now, I wanted to bring this into our podcast conversations and there are few people better to do that with than player, coach, friend, and also pre-eminent scholar of the history and political economy of sports around the world, Professor Frank Andre Guridy. Frank is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His most recent book, ‘The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play’ tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice from the 19th century until the present. His previous book, ‘The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics’ explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. Frank is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and the Caribbean. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. He has also won awards for his teaching and service at multiple institutions, receiving the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019, and the Faculty Service Award at Columbia in 2023.Frank’s booksThe Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024)The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (Austin:University of Texas Press, 2021)Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010)Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (NYU Press, 2010)Other linkshttps://history.columbia.edu/person/guridy-frank/https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-guridy-401b87230/