Graduate school ruins your ability to view anything related to your topic of study with an unacademic eye. This is fine if your topic doesn’t come up every day like, say, Byzantine art, but when you choose something that crops up often, like the influence of American music on Continental youth culture in the 1950s, it means you’ll be mentally revising your thesis every time you hear “Johnny B. Goode.” I’m reminded of this phenomenon every Olympiad because I wrote my master’s thesis on sports in Nazi Germany, using the party’s sports policy up until the 1936 Berlin Olympics as a window into their ideas about race and its intersection with political priorities before the war. The fast-approaching 2012 Olympics already have me mentally revising my thesis (something I’m sure I’ll be doing on my death bed), but the most recent issue of our journal Critical Survey has me wondering if I didn’t miss an altogether more interesting topic- sports and gender. Continue reading “Gender, Sports, and Culture: The Victorians and Us”
Tag: critical survey
Hot Off the Presses- New Journal Releases from Berghahn
Critical Survey, Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring 2012
German Politics and Society, Volume 30, Issue 2, Summer 2012
Girlhood Studies, Volume 5, Issue 1, Summer 2012, Special Issue: “Girls and Dolls”
Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, Volume 38, Issue 2, Summer 2012, Special Issue: “Writing History for a Variety of Publics”