About

I am an Assistant Professor of World history at Ursinus College, outside of Philadelphia. I teach courses in World and European history. My courses include “GOAL! Sport in World History, “Nationalism and Memory in Modern Europe,” “Empire, Patriarchy, and Race: Power and People in Modern World History,” “Cold War in Europe: Gender, Labor, and Immigrants,” and “Oral History: Collecting All Voices.”

My manuscript-in-progress, titled Changing the Game: Hungarian Athletes and International Sport during the Cold War, explores an uncharted, human aspect of Cold War cultural history: how Hungarian athletes shaped the sport world from 1948-1989. Hungary’s impressive sport history and geopolitical status – it became the third-strongest world sport power under Stalinism and later served the IOC as an intermediary with more contentious Communist countries – make the Hungarian sport community a compelling case study to examine Cold War international culture. The project examines the motivations and evolving relationship between the IOC and Hungarian sport leaders on the one hand, and sport leaders and Hungarian athletes on the other. It argues that international sport was not simply an arena for Communist repression and traditional Cold War cultural and diplomatic tensions to play out. Rather, the manuscript demonstrates how athletes, sport leaders, and the IOC engaged in sporting cooperation with one another in order to achieve their respective aims from the 1960s-1980s. Athletes influenced international sport through their increased agency vis-a-vis, and cooperation with, sport leaders, who in turned worked collegially with the IOC to shape its culture and international policies in order to benefit athletes at home.

In one of the first Cold War analyses grounded in athletes’ experiences and memories, I situate their voices in the international sport world by triangulating thirty-five oral histories with Hungarian athletes, coaches, and sport leaders with archival documents from Hungary, Switzerland, and the US. Although typically portrayed as helpless victims or wily resistors, the experiences of Hungarian athletes demonstrate how they asserted agency by choosing to work with sport leaders to improve their lives. Changing the Global Gamedirects scholars of Eastern Europe, Sport History, and the Cold War toward Hungary and demonstrates that histories examining international culture and the Cold War must consider the ways in which people’s actions in the less-contentious Middle Bloc states navigated and shaped the creation of both.

My research has been awarded numerous prestigious grants, including the Olympic Studies Centre’s PhD Research Grant, the North American Society for sport History Dissertation Travel Grant, and a Fulbright Grant. I have also received several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Hungary.