Tom Roberts has taught history at RISD since 1984, focusing on propaganda, war, sports and the history of television. Before that he was executive director for 22 years of the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (RICH). He recently was presented with RICH’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his extensive body of diverse cultural work as an educator, writer, performer, producer and leader. He has earned multiple honors over the course of his career, including seven Emmy Award nominations from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences New England Chapter, a nomination for Grammy Award for Best Children’s Recording, a nomination for Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Short Subject and several certificates of merit from the American Association for State and Local History. He also earned RISD’s 2017 Robert R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Courses
Wintersession 2025 Courses
HPSS S674-101 - A HISTORY OF SPORTS
LevelUndergraduate
Subject History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences
Period Wintersession 2025
Credits 3
FormatSeminar
Start date
End date
HPSS S674-101
A HISTORY OF SPORTS
LevelUndergraduate
Subject History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences
In most advanced cultures of the world, the passion for sports has reached into many and unexpected aspects of society. As participants or observers, we all, at one time or another, recognize the power of sports as spectacle, distraction or metaphor. This course will examine the evolution of sport from competition among individual athletes in the ancient world through the rise of team sports in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will then consider the influence of sports on language, politics, gender identity, art and architecture, literature, media, and apparel, among others. Sports inevitably have an interrelation with class, race, and nationalism; and they have developed their own myth & ritual & hagiography, aesthetics, economy, cult of celebrity and statistical idiom. There will be readings, assigned papers, classroom presentations, an exam and field trips to local sports events.
