Amy Bass, PhD
School of Arts and Sciences, Purchase, NY
Biography
Amy Bass is a professor in the Sport Studies Department, where her interests focus
on sport, culture, and politics. She received a Ph.D. with distinction in history
with a comparative in cultural studies from Stony Brook University, and did her undergraduate
work at Bates College. 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 those interested in studying sport from
a cultural perspective. Her followup, In the Game, solidified that reputation. Her
third book, Those About Him Remained Silent: the Battle over W.E.B. Du Bois, received
Honorable Mention from the National Council on Public History.
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,
and was featured on the Today Show, NPR's "The Takeaway," Midday," "Under the Radar,"
and "Only a Game," and in Sports Illustrated and ESPN's The Undefeated, as well as
other national media. It has been optioned by Netflix. 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."
Bass edits her own series, "Sporting," for Temple University Press. In mainstream
media, she has written for Slate, Salon, and The Christian Century, and is a frequent
contributor for CNN, both in print and in studio, and worked across eight Olympic
Games for NBC Sports, winning an Emmy Award for Live Event Turnaround at the London
Olympic Games.
Areas of Expertise
Identity Politics
Racial Politics
Politics
Sports
Culture
Return of sports after quarantine
African American History and Culture
Accomplishments
2018
Boston Globe
2018
Library Journal
2005-2006, 2009-2010, 2013- 2016
The College of New Rochelle
2014
Bates College
2013
"Outstanding Live Event Turnaround: Games of the XXX Olympiad," National Academy for Television Arts and Sciences
Education
1999
Ph.D., History
1994
M.A., History
1992
B.A., History
Affiliations
- Board of Directors, New Rochelle Public Library Foundation
- Consultant, Netflix
Links
Selected Media Appearances
CNN
2020-12-10
Early this year, the death of Kobe Bryant, a complicated hero, seemed likely to dominate the end-of-year sports headlines. Now that moment, and the outpouring of national emotion that followed it, almost feels like another lifetime.
WAMC
2020-12-09
On this week’s 51%, a woman tells her story about being thrown off track and embracing the change and community she gains; a sports studies professor discusses Major League Baseball’s first female general manager and older women beware the chair — a new study shows the harmful effect of sitting for long periods of time.
CNN
2020-11-13
As baseball legend has it, in 1950, 13-year-old Kathryn "Tubby" Johnston asked her mother to cut her hair so she could don the uniform of the King's Dairy Little League team and play ball. After playing several games as a boy, by mid-season she let her coach and teammates know about her secret, but her prowess kept her safe at first base despite the jeers from opposing players and their parents.
Inside Higher Ed
2020-07-28
Some institutions have turned informing students about the novel coronavirus into an educational opportunity. At Manhattanville University, a private institution in New York, first-year students are being offered a free summer course for credit about COVID-19. Amy Bass, professor of sport studies at the college, helped design the course, which grew from a multidisciplinary research group she participated in pre-COVID-19. Just under 100 incoming first-year students are registered for the course, said Bass.
Selected Event Appearances
Key West Literary Seminar, January 2020
Key West, FL
134th Annual Meeting of American Historical Association, January 2020
New York, NY
In Conversation with Kim Wyant and Courtney Levensohn, Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, May 2019
New York, NY
Critical Sports Communities: New Directions in Sports Scholarship, Journalism, and Activism, Hofstra University, February 2019
Hempstead, NY
Baltimore Writers’ Conference, November 2018
Baltimore, MD
Selected Articles
Journal of American History
2014
At one of the inaugural sessions of the newly minted Sports Studies Caucus at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2012, Daniel A. Nathan, author of Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal, stated that “the place of sport in American Studies is radically smaller … and more marginal, than the place of sport in American culture.” Nathan described the isolation of “sports history” while sitting next to the historians John Bloom, Adrian Burgos Jr., and myself, as well as the literature professor and former professional football player Michael Oriard, whose revolutionary Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993) used a Geertzian analysis to transform the sports page into...
Journal of American History
2014
Susan K. Cahn wants to play fantasy history; I am all in. It is a concept as charming as it is creative, as it issues a call to ranks, a challenge. In the best of competitive spirits, I have had an ongoing list of fantasy history team draft picks in my head since I first read her words. To find my starting lineup, I would need to go no further than the writers of the responses here—a veritable dream team, if I can make good on Daniel A. Nathan's point about “sportuguese.” These scholars demonstrate exactly how to craft worthy history: analyzing and questioning what I did in my state-of-the-field essay and then pushing the themes forward to important, innovative, and necessary places...