Sporting Blackness

Lauren McLeod Cramer is an Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the aesthetics of Blackness and popular culture. She is currently writing a book on the architecture of blackness that uses architectural design to theorize about hip-hop’s “joints,” the points of articulation between the aesthetics of Blackness and visual culture. Lauren is a founding member of&nbsp;liquid blackness, a research project on Blackness and aesthetics, and is the co-Editor liquid blackness: &nbsp;journal of aesthetics and black studies. Her writing has appeared in&nbsp;The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,&nbsp;The Black Scholar,&nbsp;Black Camera, Film Criticism,&nbsp;and the edited collection&nbsp;Writing for Screen Media&nbsp;(Routledge, 2019).

Lauren McLeod Cramer

Talking About Practice: Samantha Sheppard’s “Sporting Blackness”

LARB Ball

Michael Z. Newman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the Department of English and the Program in Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies, and the author most recently of&nbsp;Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America&nbsp;(MIT). He writes about cinema, television, video, games, and new media. He is @mznewman on twitter.

Michael Z. Newman

Basketball Was Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

<h4>Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) is the TV editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.&nbsp;His essays have appeared in&nbsp;Slate,&nbsp;The New Republic, and other venues, and he's co-founder of the Dear Television column. He's the author of&nbsp;The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era&nbsp;(Columbia University Press, 2019) and&nbsp;Avidly Reads Screen Time&nbsp;(New York University Press, 2023). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.</h4>

Phillip Maciak

Process Stories, or Who Loves the Sixers?

<a href="https://www.lindsaysarahkrasnoff.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.lindsaysarahkrasnoff.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1568168879647000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGhP8r_HjOup2Z4F5QKPymBgIDAYQ">Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff</a>&nbsp;is a writer, historian, and consultant working at the intersection of sports and diplomacy. Author of The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010, she has written for The Athletic, CNN International, The New Yorker, and others, and serves as a Research Associate with the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London. She previously served with the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, and authored "<a href="https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/wwi" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/wwi&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1568168879647000&amp;usg=AFQjCNEelJNoFqkThvK0NFgkxOB9OVFzEA">Views From the Embassy</a>: The Role of the U.S. Diplomatic Community in France, 1914-1917."&nbsp;Follow Lindsay on Twitter @Lempika7.

Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff

The Hidden Mystery of Hoops Diplomacy: France vs. China, 1966

No Place I Would Rather Be

<h4>Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications.</h4>

Kevin Canfield

A One-Man Archive of Baseball History

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

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Kieran Setiya teaches philosophy at MIT. He is the author of Midlife: A Philosophical Guide (2017), Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way (2022), and a Substack newsletter, <a href="https://ksetiya.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-safelink="true" data-linkindex="1">Under the Net.</a>

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Kieran Setiya

On Infinite Baseball: An Interview with Alva Noë

"I see great things in baseball." — Walt Whitman

Sports

<h4 class="p1">Michael J. Agovino is the author of The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City and The Soccer Diaries: An American’s Thirty-Year Pursuit of the International Game.</h4>

Michael J. Agovino

The Improvisational Wonders of Jazz and Soccer

Samantha N. Sheppard is the Mary Armstrong Meduski '80 Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Performing &amp; Media Arts at Cornell University. She writes extensively on black cultural production and production cultures. She is the co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry&nbsp;and has a forthcoming manuscript titled&nbsp;Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory On Screen, which is under contract with the University of California Press.&nbsp;

Samantha N. Sheppard

Give and Go: The Double Movement of Shut Up and Dribble

Yago Colás teaches and writes about sports, culture, and society in the English Department at Oberlin College, where he also volunteers as assistant coach for the men’s varsity basketball team. He maintains the blog&nbsp;<a href="http://yagocolas.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://yagocolas.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541019685943000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGo0QDw7wqRu57jNauGn3gVQO3cHQ">Between the Lines</a>, has appeared on NPR, Slate, Politico&nbsp;and <a href="http://espn.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://ESPN.com&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1541019685943000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF-uYklPjwQ_sKeT8yrrc5u6daNSw">ESPN.com</a>&nbsp;and is the author of Ball Don’t Lie! Myth, Genealogy, and Invention in the Cultures of Basketball&nbsp;(Temple University Press, 2016) and is currently writing Numbers Don’t Lie! Counting and What Counts in Basketball&nbsp;(forthcoming, University of Nebraska Press, 2020).

Yago Colás

<div>Theresa Runstedtler is Associate Professor of History at American University. She is the author of Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (University of California Press, 2012), a&nbsp;book that examines the first African American world heavyweight champion’s legacy as a black sporting hero and anticolonial icon in the early 1900s. Her second book project in progress explores questions of blackness, masculinity, labor, and criminalization through the lens of professional basketball's so-called Dark Ages of the 1970s. In another life, she was a member of the Toronto Raptors Dance Pak in the late 1990s.</div>
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Theresa Runstedtler

<div class="tb f5">Brian R. Jacobson&nbsp;is author of&nbsp;Studios Before the System (Columbia University Press, 2015) and&nbsp;professor of visual culture at Caltech.</div>

Brian R. Jacobson

The LARB Ball NBA Roundtable

Sarah J. Jackson is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a 2019 New America National Fellow. An expert in how communication constructs identity and shapes social change in U.S. culture, her work considers how media, journalism and technology are used by and represent Black and feminist activists. Her first book,&nbsp;Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press&nbsp;(Routledge, 2014) examines the relationship between Black celebrity activism, journalism and American politics. Her&nbsp;forthcoming co-authored book,&nbsp;Hashtag&nbsp;Activism: Race&nbsp;and Gender in America’s Networked Counterpublics,&nbsp;focuses on the use of Twitter in contemporary racial justice and gender justice movements.

Sarah J. Jackson

Kathleen Bachynski is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Health, where she researches and teaches on sports safety,&nbsp;ethics, and the&nbsp;history of medicine.&nbsp;She holds an MPH in epidemiology from the University of Michigan and a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. She has authored articles&nbsp;in the&nbsp;New England Journal of Medicine, Injury Prevention, American Journal of Public Health, and the&nbsp;Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.&nbsp;She is currently completing a book for the University of North Carolina Press on the history of debates over the safety of youth tackle football.&nbsp;

Kathleen Bachynski

Travis Vogan is associate professor of in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. &nbsp;He is the author of&nbsp;Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media&nbsp;(University of Illinois Press),ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire&nbsp;(University of Illinois Press), and&nbsp;ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television&nbsp;(University of California Press).