Roundtable on Teaching Sport

Emmy award winning writer Amy Bass, Ph.D., is Professor of Sport Studies and Chair of the Division of Social Science and Communication at Manhattanville College. As a writer and scholar, she engages audiences inside and outside of academia with a focus on sport, culture, and politics. Her first book, Not the Triumph, but the Struggle: the 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete, is considered a standard-bearer for the study of sport from a cultural perspective. Her most recent work, One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together, was named a best book of 2018 by the Boston Globe and Library Journal; was featured on the Today Show, NPR’s “The Takeaway,” “Midday,” “Under the Radar,” and “Only a Game,” and excerpted in both Sports Illustrated and ESPN’s The Undefeated. It has been optioned for film. In its starred review of the book, Kirkus called ONE GOAL “an edifying and adrenaline-charged tale,” while the Wall Street Journal declared it “the perfect parable for our time,” and the Globe & Mail dubbed it “magnificent and significant.” She edits her own series, “Sporting,” for Temple University Press. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Salon and CNN Opinion, where she is a frequent contributor on the intersections of sport, culture, and politics, and she provides sport commentary for Northeast Public Radio. A veteran of eight Olympic Games, she received her Emmy in 2012 for Outstanding Live Event Turnaround for her work for NBC’s Olympics coverage in London. A native of the Berkshires, she resides in the New York metropolitan area with her husband, daughter, and a dog named Cuffy. Bass received a Ph.D. in History with distinction from Stony Brook University.