ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS…

JILL AGOSTINO graduated in 1986 from Ithaca College and worked as sports editor on a small weekly paper in upstate New York for three years. She went to Syracuse University in 1989 for a masters degree in magazine journalism, also working in the sports information office there, and then to the Syracuse Post-Standard for two years as a sports copy editor. Next she went to Newsday for two years, also as a sports copy editor, until New York Newsday closed and people were scattering. Facing offers from both the New York Times and the New York Daily News, she originally turned down the Times and went to the Daily News for seven months, then came to the Times, where she's been a sports editor for about three years. She is current president of the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM).

MICHAEL ALTIMORE is professor of sociology at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In addition to the sociology of sport, his interests include the sociology of science and discourse analysis. He is too modest to advertise his encyclopedic knowledge of movies.

JOSEPH ARBENA, a Latin America specialist with degrees in history and foreign affairs, has taught at Clemson University in South Carolina since 1965. He is author of half a dozen books related to the study of Latin American culture, including Sport and Society in Latin America: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Rise of Mass Culture (1988) and a forthcoming annotated bibliography of works on Latin American sport. He is former editor of the Journal of Sport History, and currently on the editorial boards of that journal as well as Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies and an Argentine electronic journal on sports and physical education.

JOHN BALE is professor of Sports Geography at Keele University, England. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, and educated at the University of London (London School of Economics). In 1995 he was a visiting professor at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and has lectured in most countries of western Europe, in Australia and in the US and Canada. His main works include Sport, Space and the City, Landscapes of Modern Sport and (with Joe Sang) Kenyan Running: Movement Culture, Geography and Global Change. He is currently completing a book on the European representation of indigenous athleticism in colonial Rwanda.

RALPH BELIVEAU, a doctoral student in mass communication at the University of Iowa, also teaches rhetoric. His two little girls help him keep the rigors of grad school in proper perspective.

SUSAN BIRRELL has been a professor in Health, Sport and Leisure Studies at the University of Iowa since 1980, and previously taught at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She is former chair of Women’s Studies at Iowa and an affiliated faculty member with American Studies. Her research and teaching use approaches from critical cultural studies to explore the meanings of sport in North America. She has written extensively on feminist analyses of sport. She and Nancy Theberge wrote a section for the multidisciplinary book Women and Sport (1994), and she co-edited Women, Sport and Culture (1994) with Cheryl Cole. Her latest book, Reading Sport Critically, CO-edited with Mary McDonald, is due out next year. She is currently researching the social history of the vacation in the United States.

TERI BOSTIAN, a senior editor of the online sports journalism alternative <www.sportsjones.com> and an unreconstructed tomboy, received her master’s degree from the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program and has published several literary essays about women's athletics. She teaches writing at Grinnell College.

SUSAN BROWNELL was formerly a nationally-ranked track and field athlete (heptathlon) in the US. She received national media coverage as "the American girl who won glory for Beijing University" when she won a gold medal for Beijing City in the 1986 National College Games, during a year of language study at Beijing University. She returned to China to study sport theory at the Beijing University of Physical Education, research which led to her book Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic (University of Chicago Press, 1995). She has authored articles on sports, television, gender and nationalism in China and taught at Middlebury College, the University of Washington and Yale University. She now is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

JOHN ERICKSON, on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, teaches writing and courses on the intellectual and cultural history of news. Between college and his doctoral work at the University of Illinois, he was a newspaper reporter and editorial writer. He has been seen reading sports pages and in fact knows more than most human beings about the history of baseball box scores.

BETTINA FABOS is an Iowa Fellow in the Language, Literacy and Culture doctoral program at the University of Iowa. She has a background in video production and is an award-winning video artist. She also has a strong interest in cultural studies and has written about the televised coverage of figure skating and the narrative strategies in Olympic coverage since 1991. Currently she is analyzing the role of Internet technologies in education from perspectives of political economy. She and her husband, Chris Martin, are working on the second edition of an introductory mass communication textbook, Media and Culture by Dick Campbell.

SARAH FIELDS grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, gaining distinction for breaking the gender barrier in the suburban soccer scene as a seven year old. After traveling east to obtain a BA in psychology and a number of intramural champion t-shirts from Yale University, she worked for a year as a legislative correspondent on Capital Hill. Disillusioned with politics and the notion of work generally, she returned to St. Louis to pursue a career in intramural flag football and three-on-three basketball. Despite winning championships in both, she was forced to depart Washington University after graduating with a law degree with an emphasis in constitutional law. Still convinced that work was no way to spend one's time, she moved west to Pullman, Washington, and obtained a master's degree in American Studies from Washington State University and an introduction to rugby. She returned to the Midwest to pursue a doctorate in American Studies at the University of Iowa, specializing in sport and constitutional law. When not forced by peer pressure and guilt to work on her dissertation ("Female Gladiators: Contact Sport, Gender and Law in America"), she plays and coaches rugby.

GAO YUNXIANG, a University of Iowa doctoral candidate in history, grew up in Inner Mongolia and has bachelor and master degrees in history from Beijing University. Her undergraduate work was in Chinese and world history, and her master's program focused on modern European and American history. Her interest in the political and social significance of women's sports in wartime China emerged from her wanderings through the UI library's Chinese-language collection.

JIM HARRIS is the owner of Prairie Lights Bookstore, one of the Midwest’s best-known independent bookshops, which he opened in 1978. In addition to Nobel, Pulitzer and Booker Prize winners, the store has hosted numerous sports writers and commentators, including John Feinstein for his Bobby Knight book, former Detroit Tigers defensive tackle, actor and sometime author Alex Karras and motor-mouthed TV personality Dick Vitale, whom Harris found especially displeasing.

HUANG JIANXIANG has been a passionate soccer follower and recreational player all his life. A former tour guide in Beijing, he was chosen for a sports anchor position with China Central Television on the basis of his sports knowledge, foreign language ability and other talents, but only after a series of lucky breaks–including getting by a height requirement that he did not quite meet. CCTV viewers have repeatedly chosen him their favorite sports announcer. He has traveled all over the world reporting on soccer as well as swimming, table tennis and many other sports, and is visiting Iowa for the first time, along with his wife Sun Ying, a CCTV technician.

MICHAEL KATOVICH is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at Texas Christian University. He is a Chicago White Sox fan, which explains his gloomy orientation to baseball in particular, and sports in general. It also explains why he assigns a great deal of importance to pyrrhic victories and only believes in God when it comes to the bad things.

RAY KELLY is a globe-trotting professional basketball player now living in Seattle. As a college point guard at UC-Santa Barbara, he finished his senior year with 205 assists, breaking the previous single season record set by Brian Shaw (an NBA first-round draft pick). He played for the Atlantic Basketball Association Pottsville Stingers during 1993-94, and subsequently in Turkey, Indonesia, China and Chile.

MARTINE KINTZIGER, from Luxembourg, is a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Iowa and UI’s coordinator for instructional programs and research projects in International Programs.

JAMES KRAMER is a native of Farley, Iowa (pop. 1,500), where his parents have lived in the same house for 27 years. He turned 22 last December and is a May graduate with a degree in journalism and political science. He worked for the sports department of the Daily Iowan through college, becoming sports editor his final semester. This summer, he has a 12-week internship at The Des Moines Register, mainly doing sports copy-editing. Afterwards he hopes to quickly find full-time employment at a decent-sized daily paper. His long-term goal is to become a professional sports beat writer for a major daily. He enjoys sports, music, hanging out with friends, politics and international current events.

SHELLEY LUCAS is a University of Iowa doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies of Sport and Leisure. Her research interests include media representations of female athletes, women's sport history and women's studies. Her work on media representation has focused primarily on Nike's advertising campaigns for girls and women. Her dissertation research is on the history of Iowa girls' high school basketball, including an emphasis on the recent switch from six-player to five-player rules.

GUDMUNDUR MAGNUSSON, professor of economics at the University of Iceland, was educated in Sweden and the US. What he calls his research "spillover" into sport is manifested in an interest in the financing and organization of sports and in cost-benefit analyses of various types of sports, lifestyles and health care.

CHRISTOPHER MARTIN received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1995 and now is assistant professor and coordinator of the electronic media division of Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa. His teaching includes courses on electronic media literacy, writing for electronic media, video production, script writing, TV criticism and popular culture; and his research involves cultural analysis of TV, including televised sports.

DAVID McMAHON, a doctoral student in history at the University of Iowa, has published articles in several scholarly journals and written entries on black athletes for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Ethnic Sports in America. He is currently working on his dissertation, "Exhibiting Ethnicity: Ethnic Heritage and History Museums in Iowa Communities at the End of the Twentieth Century," and also on a book about Iowa’s African American history.

DOUG MIDGETT is on the anthropology faculty at the University of Iowa. His research in the English-speaking Caribbean has focussed on migration, political and economic change, labor movements and trade unionism. He also has written about expressive culture in St. Lucia, an island where he served in the Peace Corps, an association going back more than 30 years. He’s a great fan of cricket but by his own account can't bat worth a lick.

JOHN NJUE was born in Chuka, a small town in eastern Kenya. He received his bachelor's degree from Kenyatta University in 1987, taught high school for awhile, then earned his MA from the University of Nairobi and took a teaching post at Kenyatta University. Currently a graduate student in Curriculum and Instruction in the University of Iowa's College of Education, he also teaches Swahili in the department of linguistics.

TINA PARRATT is a faculty member in the University of Iowa’s department of Sports, Health and Leisure Studies, teaching courses on sport in the Western world and the history of women in sport. She received her doctorate in physical education from Ohio State University in 1994 and did her master’s and undergraduate work in Canada and the UK. Her research focuses on working-class leisure culture in mid-Victorian England.

LIZ PEARCE, a native of Liverpool and therefore eminently qualified to comment on any aspect of soccer, began her career as a physical education teacher at a comprehensive (high) school in Gloucester, England. She came to the US in 1984 to serve as an assistant coach for the University of Iowa field hockey team while she pursued a master’s in the sociology of sport. She currently heads the outreach and programming department of International Programs at the University of Iowa.

JUDY POLUMBAUM has taught at the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication for 10 years and does research on mass media in mainland China. Her interest in Chinese sports dates from the 1980 World Cup victory of the Chinese women’s volleyball team, which she witnessed from a TV lounge in Beijing. Her interest in sports generally arises from her childhood fear of dodge ball and from raising two sons in Iowa, one a sixties-type aficionado of Ultimate Frisbee, the other into American football, fishing and other macho jock stuff.

ROEL PUIJK, originally from the Netherlands, did his doctoral work at the University of Oslo and now chairs the Faculty of Culture and Media Studies at Lillehammer College. He had the lead role in a large-scale study of media coverage of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer and edited the resulting volume, Global Spotlights in Lillehammer: How the World viewed Norway during the 1994 Winter Olympics (1997). He also has published a participant study of TV production practices at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and co-authored a book on how the Norwegian press covers social problems; and he headed Norway’s national media studies association for several years.

JIMMIE REEVES teaches in the School of Mass Communications at Texas Tech University. He’s published numerous works on television’s rewriting of the world of sports, including essays on sportscasting, sports stardom and professional wrestling and an analysis of the scandal surrounding the death of basketball player Len Bias which appears in a cultural analysis of TV he co-authored with Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (1994).

MICKI SCHUNEMAN, a University of Iowa student double-majoring in journalism and communication studies, has worked with Judy Polumbaum on various sports research projects as an undergraduate scholar assistant for the past two years. She hopes to become a documentary filmmaker.

MARK SIDEL served as Ford Foundation program officer in China on law and governance and directed Ford's programs in Vietnam for three years. He teaches about philanthropy and nonprofit institutions and Chinese and Vietnamese law at Iowa's College of Law. He takes up a new Ford posting in New Delhi beginning this summer, overseeing work on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. He is, entirely inexplicably, interested in the social and political aspects of cricket in South Asia and hopes to attend many cricket matches.

MURRAY SPERBER, professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University, is working on his fourth book about college sports, Beer and Circus: The Impact of Bigtime College Sports on Undergraduate Education. His influential critique of intercollegiate athletics, College Sports Inc: The Athletic Department vs. The University (1990), established him as perhaps the nation’s preeminent analyst of US college sport and, for those who follow Indiana basketball, the nemesis of coach Bobby Knight. His other books include Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (1993) and Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped College Sports (1998). He has published widely in the general-interest media and is a frequent guest on national and regional TV and radio. A graduate of Purdue and the University of California-Berkeley, he also spent two years after college playing basketball in France.

CHRISTOPHER SQUIER, professor and associate dean at Iowa’s College of Dentistry, is an oral pathologist specializing in the havoc wreaked upon the mouth, and on society generally, by tobacco use. He was one of the main movers behind a recent campaign that persuaded the city councils of both Iowa City and Coralville to declare a no-smoking weekend in March which led a number of restaurateurs to ban smoking from their premises permanently. Educated in Britain, he came to Iowa in 1975. He is an editor of several important pathology textbooks and has authored or co-authored more than 130 book chapters and articles.

JOHN SUGDEN, reader and deputy head of Chelsea School, University of Brighton, UK, did his undergraduate work in politics and sociology at the University of Essex and spent a postgraduate year at the University of Liverpool before accepting a graduate assistantship at the University of Connecticut, where he obtained his Ph.D. in the sociology of sport in 1982. He has researched and published widely in this area. His book Sport, Sectarianism and Society in a Divided Ireland, co-authored with Alan Bairner, was awarded the Lord Abadaire prize for literature in 1994; and his comparative study of the subculture of boxers, Boxing and Society, was named 1998 book of the year by the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. He is co-author, with Alan Tomlinson, of FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the People’s Game? (1998).

NANCY THEBERGE is a professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she holds a joint appointment in the departments of kinesiology and sociology. She has published widely on topics related to gender, sport and physical activity. Her most recent project, an ethnography of women's ice hockey in Canada, is the subject of a forthcoming book, Higher Goals: Women, Gender and Ice Hockey, being published by SUNY (State University of New York) Press.

IAN THOMSEN graduated from Northwestern University’s journalism school in 1983, worked as a sportswriter for the Boston Globe for six years, went on to The National Sports Daily (RIP) for its brief life and then spent three years in Paris and another three in London covering mainly European sports for the International Herald Tribune. Since late 1997 he’s been a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, based in Boston.

ALAN TOMLINSON, professor of Sport and Leisure Cultures at Chelsea School, University of Brighton, UK, did his undergraduate study in literature and sociology at the University of Kent and completed master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on the social history and sociology of consumption, with particular emphasis on the Olympic Games and the (soccer) World Cup. His books include FIFA and the Contest for World Football: Who Rules the People’s Game? (with John Sugden, 1998); Understanding Sport: An Introduction to the Sociological and Cultural Analysis of Sport (with John Horne and Garry Whannel, 1999); The Game’s Up: Essays in the Cultural Analysis of Sport, Leisure and Popular Culture (1999); and the forthcoming Sport and Leisure Cultures: Local, Global and National Dimensions, to be published this year by University of Minnesota Press. He is the incoming (2000-2004) editor of the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, the journal of the International Sociology of Sport Association.

THERESA WALTON is a University of Iowa doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies of Sport. Her research work in sport has included media representations of violence, women's sport and homophobia. Her reading of Prefontaine's media representations comes out of her master's thesis work. Her previous writing on this subject earned her the 1998 top student paper award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

SOON HEE WHANG, from Korea, teaches sociology at Tsukuba University in Japan. She has done research on comparative study of notions of beauty and make-up, the importance of credentials and school networks, sumo wrestling and other topics in the sociology of culture, education and sports. Her most recent published works include a book on Japanese elite high schools (1998) and an article on "Body culture and symbolic power" in an edited volume of papers from a sociology of sport conference held in Kyoto in 1997.

STEPHEN WIETING has studied at Whitworth College, Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Minnesota. A member of the sociology faculty at the University of Iowa, he currently teaches courses on comparative family, research methods and popular culture. Continuing research projects include the history of domestic law in Iceland; and a venture on sport and the moral order, in collaboration with scholars in the US, Norway, Iceland, Luxembourg, India and Kenya.