Episode 83: Dr. Johanna Mellis on Understanding History through Sports

Dear Adam Silver

Dr. Johanna Mellis is an Assistant Professor of History at Ursinus College where her research focuses on international sport during the Cold War, namely in the Eastern Bloc and Hungary especially, in order to connect the local voices and experiences of Hungarian athletes to the IOC and broader international sport society. Her manuscript, Changing the Global Game: Hungarian Athletes and International Sport During the Cold War, examines Hungarian sportspeople’s interactions with the International Olympic Committee from 1948-1989. Changing the Global Game shows how Hungarian athletes, Socialist Hungarian state sport officials, and the IOC gradually realized by the 1960s that sporting cooperation with one another - and not East-West political clashes nor resistance - was the way to achieve their respective aims of sport success, career and financial stability, and political and institutional strength.

Our conversation covers many different topics, but we do repeatedly come back to a consistent theme of unlearning our early understandings of world history through sport to form a better, more accurate, and historically inclusive narrative.

You can follow Dr. Mellis's amazing and well curated Twitter feed @JohannaMellis. As I share in the podcast, my eyes have been opened to a multitude of different historical perspectives on sports through Dr. Mellis's Twitter account.

Dr. Mellis also cohosts the End of Sport Podcast, a podcast on capitalist sport, labor, and justice for end times. The show features interviews with athletes, critical sports journalists, and fellow academics to explore all the ways that people use sport to harm others - i.e. through racist mascotry, the NCAA and higher ed’s exploitation of Black and Brown college athletic workers, sexual abuse and harassment, transphobia, and more.

You can read Dr. Mellis's writing alongside her End of Sport cohosts in The Chronicle of Higher Ed, The Guardian, Time, The Baffler, and more. She also has sole-authored pieces with The Washington Post and Arizona State University’s Global Sport Matters.

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