Symposium Information
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General Information
Timetable and Events
The steering group meets at regular intervals, beginning at Easter 2008. There will be four symposia in Cambridge:
- European Sports History: Models, Interpretations and Historiographies (3 days, July 2008);
- Sport in Interwar Europe: Diffusion, Reception and Appropriation of the British Model (3 days, July 2009);
- Sport in a Divided Europe: Identity, Affluence and Convergence (3 days, January 2010);
- Dissemination of the network’s results to non-academic constituencies (1 day, Easter 2010).
Key participants
Click here for a list of participating scholars.
Other Outputs
Click here for further links to other outputs, journal articles and other publications.
Symposium 1: Methodological and Historiographical Considerations
Symposium 1 focused on exploring the problems associated with defining a distinctive
European model of sport. It therefore reviewed methodologies and traditions of writing
European sports history in various national traditions, identifying and evaluating cross-
cultural and pan-European scholarship in the field, and compared it with British, American
and other models of sport. To investigate such questions, the symposium assembled
social and cultural historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists, geographers,
and cultural studies specialists.
Presentation Summaries
Summaries of the Symposium 1 presentations on themes and perspectives in European sports history are available here.
Responses to Symposium
Overall reactions to Symposium 1 are available here.
Symposium 2: From the Late Nineteenth Century to World War II
Symposium 2 focused on the commonalities of the European experience of
sport as well
as its specific inflections in different national contexts
from the late nineteenth century to
the 1930s. This period was marked by
the democratization of leisure in general and sport
in particular in the
1920s, the internationalization of sport, massed participation, not least
in the new workers' sports associations, and the rapid growth of a sporting
media with its
direct influence on the promotion of sporting events. Such
themes demanded a trans-
disciplinary forum, and the symposium, opened by
Orlando Patterson (Harvard), gathered
political and cultural historians,
historical sociologists, anthropologists, and literary / aesthetic
scholars
from Europe and the US.
Presentation Summaries
Summaries of the Symposium 2 presentations are available here.
Responses to Symposium
Overall reactions to Symposium 2 are available here.
Symposium 3: The Development of Sport in Post-War Europe
Symposium 3 focused on the forces of ideological division, economic growth,
and European integration on the development of sport in post-war Europe
from the emergence of the Soviet block as a key player in world sport in
the 1950s until, and beyond, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It explored the
role of high-performance sport in creating prestige in diametrically
opposed regimes in the Cold War; the consequences of affluence and the
growth of leisure in West European liberal democracies; the implications of
the Treaty of Rome (1957) for an emerging European identity in sport as in
other areas (e.g. the creation of UEFA and the football European Cup); and
the massive impact of media coverage and commercial revenues on
professional spectator sport in an increasingly global market. With the
help of comparative studies with the United states, the symposium examined
the tension between commercial and media-driven pressures for convergence
and sport's innate national stubbornness on the threshold of the
globalization of the media from the 1990s onwards.
Presentation Summaries
Summaries of the Symposium 3 presentations are available here.
Responses to Symposium
Overall reactions to Symposium 3 are available here.
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