On Thursday, March 15, at 4pm in 340 Morrill Hall, author, scholar, and journalist David Goldblat gave a talk on how soccer can be taken out of politics but politics cannot be taken out of soccer. Goldblatt used the 2012 European Championships in Poland/Ukraine and the London Olympics, to explore the changing relationship between soccer, Britishness, and Englishness in the age of devolution. Listen to the talk here.
On Friday, March 16, at 12 noon (340 Morrill), Goldblatt hosted an informal seminar with graduate students and faculty based on his BBC radio documentary series “The Power and the Passion.” (Free download here.) Later, Goldblatt was the featured author at the Football Scholars Forum—an online academic book club based in the History Deparment—as he joined a discussion of his acclaimed book, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer. The FSF recording is available here.