Introduction: Marking the Field

Abstract

Football, or soccer as it is called in the United States, is a global cultural practice. This volume argues that the study of football’s history provides a unique opportunity to understand the human condition. Football has so pervaded language and popular anecdotes that it is difficult to write without using a metaphor or euphemism related to the sport. Critical scholarship on football has emerged from a wide variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, business, law, and sport medicine. Research structured around football, therefore, is at once discrete and broad. Because of this paradox, the study of football provides fertile ground for interdisciplinary initiatives. This volume explores the disciplinary boundaries that are shifting “beneath our feet.” Traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have come to embrace diverse research methodologies. The increased scholarly attention to football over the past decade reflects both the startling popularity of the sport and the trends in historical scholarship that have been termed the “cultural,” “interpretive,” or “linguistic” turns. This volume uses new work on football to create a dialogue between history and other disciplines, including art criticism, philosophy, and political science. It also includes work on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, which already blurs disciplinary fault lines.