All right, so how many of you academics and students out there will own up to combining (or trying to combine) your academic interests with soccer in some way, shape or form? I ask for a number of reasons: - I have, and I am doing so - It seems you can't go more than a couple months on BS without someone mentioning this or that paper they're writing about soccer and ------ - I know of 2 other people in my school alone who are doing academic research connected to soccer - mostly having something to do with globalization and popular culture - I've got a pet theory that we're going to see an upsurge in soccer-related academic research coming out of the US in the next few years and decades, mostly owing to the fact that besides being very conscious of and inquisitive into his minority status, USSoccerfan tends to be somewhat overeducated and obsessive about the state of soccer and culture nationwide and worldwide. I think that books like Andrei Markovits' and now Franklin Foer's are only the tip of the iceberg, and that there's a lot more to come. Anyway...I'm interested in hearing if anyone else is up to work along these lines - feel free to post some info about it. My own contribution to the research thus far is a paper I presented at a conference in Turkey in May (and which I'm working on getting published now), entitled 'From the Queen of England to the New Soccer Nation: Soccer Advertising and Attempts to Globalize American Sports Culture'. If you're so inclined you can check out the abstract on page 12 here.
Hope all is well at Ohio U. I take a soccer and international affairs tack at Washington State University (upper division honors course), and like to use soccer in discussions of colonization (1800s and early 1900s versions) in other settings. My book proposal on Soccer and Argentina's Military stems from research I carried out as a graduate student. If I could find the time to add the sources asked for by the peer reviewers at Routledge, then I'd have a nice publication out of it. Contact me if you ever need an experienced reviewer to take a look at your stuff.