Sports offer entry to culture, history, and intellectual debate for people who enjoy the world of ideas yet find academia inaccessible. For many young folks, sports are training for life, a place where you learn how to work hard, be a part of a team, connect with your community, and deal with success and failure. For the adults who have shifted from players to fans, sports – like art – provide prompts for laughably intense emotional experiences, connections with other human beings, and venues to declare our values and judgments.
Writers have long brought deep thought to sports, from intellectual excursions such as Clifford Geertz’s “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1972) and Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality” (1980) to sports journalism like Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (1970) and Buzz Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights” (1990); from profiles like David Foster Wallace’s “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” (2006) or Claudia Rankine’s “The Meaning of Serena Williams” (2015) to in-depth analysis such as Chuck Klosterman’s “Will Violence Save Football?” (2015) and Bryan Armen Graham’s “The New York Liberty Show Investment in Women’s Sports is Simply Good Business” (2024).
Meeting readers where they are, this issue activates humanities research to unpack the hidden histories and surprising depths of sports around the world – from tennis and football to basketball and cricket – unfurling the intricacies of athletes, fans, and the cultures that surround them, providing readers with new understandings of their favorite past-times and conversation starters for their pregame rituals. Encouraging articles that focus on specific sports, disciplines, and stories, we invite submissions that:
- Present new research on a sport or its culture
- Analyze a sport from a certain disciplinary or theoretical perspective
- Share stories of sports surfacing in art, literature, history, and scholarship
- Discuss the origins and pre-histories of popular sports
- Narrate a moment when a sporting event changed the world
- Address problems in a sport or its culture
Submission Guidelines
Article submissions should be no more than 2,000 words, not including abstract, footnotes, and bibliography.
Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities: see How to Write for Public Humanities.
Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission.
All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission: see the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information.
Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style.
Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal.
Contacts
The Special Issue editor Jeffrey R. Wilson is happy to discuss potential articles: contact him at jwilson@law.harvard.edu.
Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.
Submit an Article
All submissions should be made through the Public Humanities online peer review system.
