Originally planned as a two-day conference, ‘Telling the Story of Sport’ is now a series of online workshops co-hosted by the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol and the Institute for Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Monthly workshops from September 2020 to March 2021 will explores the multiple ways in which various sports have been culturally constructed and experienced, examining the media through which sport is represented: from the national press, often credited for allowing the development of mass spectatorship sport in nineteenth-century Europe, to the new broadcast and social media, which offer new forms of personal investment in the story of sport, via the advent of radio and television. But it also studies the creative practices that have sought to capture the experience of sport. Sport has been celebrated and served as the narrative focus in film, literature, song, and theatre, among other genres. Sports themselves and the men and women who play them have inspired eulogies, offered cautionary tales, or served to draw the reader’s attention to a range of social ills from racism to doping. ‘Telling the Story of Sport’ is a forum in which individual scholars will contextualise their research and offer a fuller understanding of the phenomenon of sporting narrative practices across a range of national cultures and media.
The first workshop, Exploring the role of sports journalism, takes place on Monday 21 September at 18.00 GMT.
Programme
- Transnationalism and the “idea of sport” in the work of Willy Meisl, “King of the Sports Journalists”
Jon Hughes (Royal Holloway, University of London) - «Entre journalisme et littérature sur 7 500 signes»: Lance Armstrong and suiveur reporting in Libération, 1999-2013
Hugh Dauncey (Newcastle University) and Ruadhán Cooke (NUI Galway). - “The world was shown that a country called Colombia exists”: press narratives of nation around Colombia’s first appearance in the World Cup in Chile 1962
Peter Watson (University of Leeds)
Attendance is free, but registration is mandatory. Please use your professional/institutional email address when registering at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/telling-the-story-of-sport-workshop-1-exploring-the-role-of…. A link to the workshop will be emailed to you by the end of the preceding week. For further details, email Professor Martin Hurcombe (m.j.hurcombe@bristol.ac.uk).
