Emmy Award-Winning Writer, Historian, Sports Studies Scholar Amy Bass Named History Department Writer-in-Residence

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The History Department will host Emmy Award-winning writer, historian, and sports studies scholar Amy Bass as its 2024 writer-in-residence with a series of events April 8-11. A schedule is as follows.

Keynote
Listen to Athletes for a Change: Why Sports Matter

Monday, April 8, 2024  |  4pm
UMass Amherst  |  Herter Hall Room 601

In 2018, when NBA star Lebron James criticized President Trump on ESPN, Fox News host Laura Ingraham told him to “shut up and dribble.” The collisions amongst politics, culture, and sport mandate that we unpack sport, make meaning out of sport, and understand that when athletes take to the court, the pitch, and the field, they bring with them who they are and what they believe in.  While “stick to sport” may be a mantra trotted out by critics who think athletes should only operate within the parameters of the games they play, sticking to sport – and all that actually comes with it – can tell us everything we need to know about the world we live in.
 

Book Reading and Author Q&A
One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together

Tuesday, April 9, 2024  |  7pm
Jones Library  |  43 Amity St, Amherst, MA 01002

About One Goal

When thousands of Somali refugees resettled in Lewiston, Maine, a struggling, overwhelmingly white town, longtime residents grew uneasy. Then the mayor wrote a letter asking Somalis to stop coming, which became a national story. While scandal threatened to subsume the town, its high school's soccer coach integrated Somali kids onto his team, and their passion began to heal old wounds. Taking readers behind the tumult of this controversial team — and onto the pitch where the teammates vied to become state champions and achieved a vital sense of understanding — One Goal is a timely story about overcoming the prejudices that divide us.

Copies are available to borrow at Amherst Jones Library and through CW-Mars.

Open Office Hours

Tuesday, April 9, and Wednesday, April 10, 2024  |  10am-12pm
UMass Amherst  |  Herter Hall Room 616

Students, staff, faculty and members of the public are invited to stop by Amy Bass's open office hours to meet her, ask questions and connect.

Fenway Opening Day Watch Party

Tuesday, April 9, 2024  |  2pm
UMass Amherst  |  Herter Hall Room 601

Watch the Red Sox take on the Baltimore Orioles at their home opener with Emmy-award winning sport scholar and Red Sox fan Amy Bass.

Roundtable on Teaching Sport

Thursday, April 11, 2024  |  12pm
UMass Amherst  |  Herter Hall Room 601

Join the UMass Amherst History Department for a brown bag lunch conversation with UMass Amherst historians Libby Sharrow and Joel Wolfe and Manhattanville College’s Amy Bass for a conversation about teaching and studying sport. Why do we teach sports history? How do we teach it? What does it offer?

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. She edits her own series, “Sporting,” for Temple University Press. She is a frequent contributor on the intersections of sport, culture, and politics, and 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.  Bass received a Ph.D. in History with distinction from Stony Brook University.

This residency is presented by the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History as part of the 2024 History Writer-In-Residence Program. Supported by Five Colleges, Inc., this program hosts renowned writers whose historical work engages broad public audiences in residence in the UMass Amherst Department of History.