Our Authors

Alex Jackson

Dr. Alexander Jackson has been a curator at the National Football Museum, England, since 2011. He also writes independently and is particularly interested in sport and leisure in the early twentieth century. He is currently writing a history of Association Football on the English Home Front during the First World War. Twitter handle - @DrAlexJack1

Alexandra Park Research Team

The Alexandra Park Research Team represents a collaboration between SpLeisH academics [Prof Dave Day, Dr Nick Piercey, Lisa Taylor & Margaret Roberts], Friends of Alexandra Park [Angela Downing, Anna Verges Bausili, Paul Benson-Hannam, Phil Dalston & Ursula Harries] and Users of the Park

Andy Carter

Andy Carter is currently a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is looking at the interaction between ancient history and the development of Victorian sport. As a public history student at Royal Holloway, University of London he produced the podcast series, A Flash Outside the Off Stump and went on to write Beyond the Pale: Black and Asian Cricketers in Britain, 1868-1945. Twitter @andykerrcarter

Archie Jenkins

After retiring as physical education teacher, he gained his MA in Sports History and Culture from de Montfort University. Various administrative posts include secretary of the Alnwick Shrovetide Football Committee. Recent research includes the C19 Alnwick Gymnastic Games, Pedestrianism in the North East of England and Robert Gibson a Powderhall winner and professional football player. He has published two books, Rainbow Led (2014), athletics in the north east of England 1914-18 and Whipper In (2016), the Northumberland and Durham Paperchase League.

Bill Williams

Bill was Head of Physical Education and sport at Burford school in Oxfordshire, from 1987- 2019. Since retiring in 2019, he has spent time researching the sporting history of the school and beyond.

Bob Nicholson

Bob Nicholson is a Senior Lecturer in history at Edge Hill University. He works on the history of nineteenth-century Britain and America, with a particular focus on journalism, popular culture, jokes, and transatlantic relations. He is currently exploring representations of the United States, and the circulation of its popular culture, in Victorian newspapers and periodicals. He is also a keen exponent of the Digital Humanities and likes to experiment with the new possibilities offered to both researchers and teachers by digital tools and archives. His work has been published in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Media History, the Victorian Periodicals Review, 19: interdisciplinary studies in the nineteenth century, and in several book chapters. He blogs at www.DigitalVictorianist.com and tweets @DigiVictorian. Email: Nicholsb@edgehill.ac.uk Twitter: @DigiVictorian​

Bob Snape

Bob is Head of the Centre for Worktown Studies at the University of Bolton and organiser of the annual Recording Leisure Lives national conferences, now in their tenth year. He has published widely in the history of leisure in Britain between 1850 and 1914 and s just completed a monograph on leisure, voluntary action and social change. Having served in various capacities on the Executive Committee of the Leisure Studies Association over the past sixteen years he is currently in his final year as Chair. He is also a member of the committee of the Voluntary Action History Society.

Brendon McGuire

Brendon spent 40 years working in physical education and sport. He led research analysing football and community which involved all English professional clubs, developing innovative educational resources for young players. Brendon's work has been published in high-level academic journals and other periodicals. His main research interest in recent years has been Manchester United in the 50s and 60s.

Brian D Bunk

Brian D. Bunk is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States published by the University of Illinois Press in 2021. The text examines various topics in the history of the sport including the first professional leagues in the United States, the development of women's football and the impact of World War I. He has also contributed essays on football history to the website of the Society for American Soccer History [https://www.ussoccerhistory.org/author/brian-d-bunk/]. From 2014-18 he produced and hosted the Soccer History USA podcast, available at SoccerHistoryUSA.org. Follow him on Twitter @SoccerHistoryUS.

Caitlin Davies

Caitlin Davies is a novelist, non-fiction writer, journalist and teacher, and many of her books are inspired by forgotten women from history. She loves setting off on the hunt for stories on a subject she initially knows little about, whether wild swimming – Downstream, Taking the Waters, Daisy Belle – or the history of female criminals – The Ghost of Lily Painter, Bad Girls. Caitlin has written six novels and six non-fiction books, and many have a watery theme. Downstream resulted in the Museum of London’s first ever Wild Swimming display, as well as a panel discussion on urban swimming at The British Library. Some of Caitlin’s books are set in Botswana, including Place of Reeds, a memoir of 12 years living in the village of Maun. Others are set in the UK, including Family Likeness, inspired in part by the true story of Dido Belle.​ Her latest venture is Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades tells the story of Holloway Prison, Europe’s most infamous prison for women. Its inmates came from all corners of the UK and included the suffragettes, Edith Thompson and Ruth Ellis.​

Carlos García

Carlos is a lecturer at Universidad Europea de Madrid, teaching sport history and sport sociology. He is currently studying the historical links between physical culture, gymnasiums, strongmen and wrestling. Carlos has previously studied national sporting cultures and playing styles through football and the impact of changing tactics on the professional ethos of both players and managers. He is not on twitter - yet, but you can contact me on carlos.garcia@universidadeuropea.es

Carol Osborne

Dr Carol Osborne is currently an independent researcher having previously worked as a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Social Sciences, specialising in Sporting History and Heritage. Her research and publications typically focus on women in sports history, gender relations in sport, and British climbing history. She sat on the British Society of Sports History (BSSH) Executive Committee 2007-17 and has worked as guest editor on several special editions of the society’s journal Sport in History.

Carol Osborne and Emma Traherne

Dr Carol Osborne is currently an independent researcher having previously worked as a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Social Sciences, specialising in Sporting History and Heritage. Her research and publications typically focus on women in sports history, gender relations in sport, and British climbing history. She sat on the British Society of Sports History (BSSH) Executive Committee 2007-17 and has worked as guest editor on several special editions of the society’s journal Sport in History. ....................................................... Emma Traherne has been the Curator at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum since 2019 where she cares for and interprets over 20,000 items which chronicle the history of lawn tennis from a popular pastime to the world class sporting tournament that is The Championships. Emma studied archaeology and museums at UCL and has worked in a variety of museums over the past decade focusing on implementing collection management best practice and researching collections to make them more accessible to the widest possible audience. Emma worked on the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum, the opening of a new museum in Brent in North London and was Collection Manager at the Houses of Parliament for Historic Furniture and Decorative Arts, looking after 11,000 working, historical objects.

Catherine Hindson

Catherine Hindson is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Bristol. She has published widely on Victorian and Edwardian performance; work that includes two monographs, Female Performance Practice on the fin-de-siècle Popular Stages of London and Paris: Experiment and Advertisement (Manchester University Press, 2007) and London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity Culture, 1880-1920 (University of Iowa Press, 2016), and numerous chapters and articles. She is currently working on a study of theatre and performance in British Industrial Villages between the late 1880s and the 1930s.

Chloe Elen Rawlingson

Chloe Elen Rawlingson is an undergraduate student studying history at the University of Chester. She takes a special interest in nineteenth-century British Theatre and Art. She enjoys painting and appreciating the community art at her local gallery in Llandudno. She intends to follow a Postgraduate study, then a career where she can have an opportunity to showcase her creativity and love for history through teaching. Chloe's twitter handle is - @ChloeElen99

Christian Vivier

Christian Vivier is full Professor (STAPS) at UPFR-Sports Besançon and member of the laboratory C3S "Culture, Sport, Health, Society" (EA 4660) of the University of Bourgogne/Franche-Comté. His research in sports history can be grouped around four main axes: emergence and development of regional body practices, physical and sports education as a teaching discipline, methodological and epistemological reflections on the history of sport, sports and physical education, and finally the historical analysis of physical exercise practices from sports iconography. His current research, in the field of social sciences of sport, aspires from the semiological analysis of the artistic representations of sport (litho-engravers, painters, posters, photographers, cartoonists, etc.), the unveiling of intimate and profound, individual and collective, social and cultural sense of the body movement that animates the adepts of physical exercise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Claire Robinson

Claire is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester and a Research Associate with the International Sport and Leisure History (SpLeisH) research team at Manchester Metropolitan University. She graduated from the University of Birmingham in 2016 with a PhD in cultural and social history. Her thesis investigated popular theatre in late Victorian Manchester. Her research investigates leisure history and the periodical press in the long nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also presents a weekly music and arts show called The WildCard for FCUM Radio, an internet radio station belonging to the fan owned football team FC United of Manchester. ​Claire's Twitter handle is @McrClaire

Conor Heffernan

Conor is Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education. He completed his PhD at University College Dublin under the supervision of Dr. Paul Rouse. His research interest lies in nineteenth and early twentieth century physical culture as found in Ireland and Great Britain. Somewhat eclectically, Conor’s previous studies have discussed the Indian club swinging phenomena in nineteenth-century Victorian England and prior to that, the politicized nature of sport under General Mobutu in Zaire.

Craig Horner

Dr Craig Horner is a teacher and researcher in history at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has been teaching and research experience in eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century history, particularly of Great Britain and Europe. For his research he is trying to understand how motoring now is a banality, a chore, a necessity - so he is interested in society, motoring, cycling and mobility and in particularly in Edwardian motoring, and the circle of the racing cyclist/racing driver Selwyn Edge (1868–1940).​ See - https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/hpp/staff/profile/index.php?id=97

Craig Statham

Craig Statham has worked in the heritage industry for almost 20 years, after having graduated from the universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews. He has published five books, the last being a biography of Bruce Springsteen during his early years. He is currently writing a biography of Jimmy Curran, with the help of Curran’s family, friends, and former students. Its working title is Jimmy Curran: From the Graveyard to the Stadio Olimpico. He gives talks throughout Scotland on a variety of topics, and will give his first talk on Jimmy Curran in the coming months. Website: http://www.craigstatham.com

Craig White

Craig is the Secretary of the Mexico Cricket Association, and holds a BA in History and MA in History of the Americas from Newcastle University. Originally from Gateshead, Craig has been living in Mexico since 2011 and in his day job works for a climate change non-profit organisation called Iniciativa Climática de México. Although he failed upwards to play international cricket for Mexico last year, in July 2018 he won the International Cricket Council’s Volunteer of the Year 2017. Craig also holds a C2 in Spanish in the European framework for languages.

Daniel Svensson

Daniel Svensson has a PhD in “History of Science, Technology and Environment” (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden). He is currently researcher and lecturer at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. His research is mainly within the fields of sport history and environmental history. Svensson’s dissertation (awarded with the International Ski History Association Ullr Award 2017) focused on the scientization of training methods in cross--‐country skiing, and meetings between scientific and experiential knowledge in sport during the 20th century. He has also published books and articles about the history of women’s football, and shifting ideas about landscape, sports heritage and mobility during the 19th and 20th century.

Dave Day

Dave Day is Professor of Sports History at Manchester Metropolitan University where he leads the International Sports and Leisure History (SpLeisH) research team. He has published extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century sport, especially in the areas of coaching, training and the history of swimming families. Dave is particularly interested in the notion of ‘history from below’, the understanding of social and cultural history through the lives of working- and middle-class individuals rather than through grand narratives and the lives of the nation’s elite. Dave is currently working on two books related to the historical transmission of coaching knowledge in Europe and between UK and North America.

David Galindo

David is a PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University and an Instructor of History at Northwest Vista College. He has earned excellence awards in teaching from NVC, the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, and a Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Nomination. He is currently working on an extended research project covering the National Basketball Association’s San Antonio Spurs and previously published an article on this topic in The International Journal of the History of Sport. 

David Pendleton

At the time that this chapter was written David was a PhD research student affiliated with the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. His research examines the rise of sporting leisure in the city of Bradford 1836-1908. He holds an MA in Northern Studies from Leeds Metropolitan University. David has been a railway signalman for over twenty-five years and is a long serving representative of the Rail Maritime and Transport trade union. Since 2005, he has been the curator of Bradford City Football Club’s museum ‘Bantamspast’. He was editor of the Bradford City fanzine The City Gent between 1997 and 2002 and, in that capacity, broadcast widely on television and radio. He has written three books and has had academic articles published on the British seaside and the regeneration of the Little Germany warehouse district of Bradford.

Dejan Zec

Dejan is Serbian historian who specializes in social history, history of everyday life, the processes of modernization in South-eastern Europe in late 19th and first half of the 20th century and the history of Serbian and Yugoslav sport. He had written and published numerous articles and book chapters, both in relevant Serbian and international journals and collections. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis at the University of Belgrade while also working as a Research Associate at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade. He is a founder and chairman of the Centre for Sports Heritage – South East Europe.

Derek Martin

Derek is a qualified lawyer, gaining his LLB at Belfast. He is currently a PhD student with the SpLeisH research group at MMU Cheshire. His studies concentrate on the development of pedestrianism between 1660 and 1914 - on which he has delivered several papers at conferences and to specialist historical societies. Derek has also ventured outside this period to speak on the origins and development of harriers clubs in Yorkshire, and male and female practitioners of multi-day pedestrian events (1800-1914)

Diane Clements

Dilwyn Porter

Dilwyn Porter is Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University. He has written extensively on twentieth century British history and on various aspects of business history. His main work in sports history has focused on Cold War sport, especially football; national and regional identity and sport; amateurism in English football; and entrepreneurship in sports-related business. He was co-editor of Sport in History from 2004 to 2008.

Douglas Hope

Doug Hope graduated from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 1964 with an Honours degree in geography and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1965. He became a Chartered Town Planner in 1970 and has pursued a career in town and country planning. He has walked and climbed in the English Lake District for over fifty years. In 2008, he gained an MA in Lake District Studies, with distinction, at the University of Lancaster. Since then, he has been researching the activities of the Co-operative Holidays Association (CHA) and Holiday Fellowship in Britain and Europe, and gained a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Lancaster in 2015 for this research. He has had several articles published on different aspects of his research and his biography of TA Leonard appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His book on TA Leonard: “Thomas Arthur Leonard and the Co-operative Holiday Association” - Joy in the widest community spread was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The book not only tells the story of Leonard, a congregational minister, but also of the history of the Holiday Association - which was instrumental in the establishment of the Youth Hostels Association in 1930 and the formation of the Ramblers Association some five years later.

Ed Odeven

Ed covers primarily basketball for The Japan Times. He reported on a wide range of sports from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2012 London Summer Games for this newspaper. A native of the Bronx, N.Y., Ed is a graduate of Arizona State University. He previously worked for the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff, Ariz., reporting on high school, collegiate, professional and Olympic sports (Flagstaff is a major international Olympic training site due to its high elevation) and writing a weekly column. His articles have appeared in Venezuela Online News, The Gleaner (Jamaica), the Monitor (Uganda), The Moscow Times, Swimming World Magazine and numerous other publications.

Ella Williams

I’m a sports feminist, postgraduate research student at the University of Edinburgh where I am exploring Girls’ experiences of Football in PE, driven by my passion to do my bit in moving towards gender equality in football. I’m a footballer myself and have been for as long as I can remember, I love the game and all the benefits it offers to the girls and women who participate: The physical strength, the fitness, the camaraderie, and the feeling of winning of course. I studied languages in my undergraduate degree then moved to Spain where I worked in sports events and studied ‘Mujer y Deporte’ (Women and Sport), a postgraduate course at Madrid Polytechnic University. I’m combining my academic studies with my passion for the game to help work towards creating equal opportunities for girls in football and breaking down gender stereotypes. I am the creator or Futfemreflect, a project which has the overall aim of increasing girls’ participation in football. I aim to do this by chatting to girls and women, sharing their experiences and opening the discussion. I want to increase awareness of the barriers that still exist to participation and to increase visibility of women in sport, because girls can’t be what they can’t see. Women and girls who play football learn to control their bodies and own their physical strength whilst dominating previously male-owned spaces. I truly believe this makes participation in football an empowering experience that should be accessible to all girls. I’m currently exploring the Mexico 1971 Women’s World Cup with members of the England squad, a World Cup that is still to be officially acknowledged by the FA. These women are the pioneers of the sport and deserve recognition for the part they have played, quite literally, in the history of Women’s football.

Emma Traherne

Emma Traherne has been the Curator at Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum since 2019 where she cares for and interprets over 20,000 items which chronicle the history of lawn tennis from a popular pastime to the world class sporting tournament that is The Championships. Emma studied archaeology and museums at UCL and has worked in a variety of museums over the past decade focusing on implementing collection management best practice and researching collections to make them more accessible to the widest possible audience. Emma worked on the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum, the opening of a new museum in Brent in North London and was Collection Manager at the Houses of Parliament for Historic Furniture and Decorative Arts, looking after 11,000 working, historical objects.

Filip Walenta

Filip Walenta is a military senior meteorologist at the airbase of Koksijde in Belgium. Since 2018 he has been a student of culture history in the Open University. In 2015 he founded Karelvanwijnendaele.be, a digital sports historical research project about the emergence and development of cycling in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, on which he has written several articles and papers. Website: http://karelvanwijnendaele.be

Fiona Skillen

Dr Fiona Skillen is a Senior Lecturer in History within the Department of Social Sciences in the Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. Her research focuses on the historical development of women's sport in Britain. She has published extensively on women’s history sport, focusing particularly on interwar developments. She is Past Chair of the British Society of Sport History and until recently she also sat on the Executive Committees of Scottish Women in Sport and Women’s History Scotland. In 2014 she was named as a BBC Woman Expert for her research on women’s sport history.

Fiona Skillen and Steve Bolton

Dr Fiona Skillen: Fiona is a Senior Lecturer in History within the Department of Social Sciences in the Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. Her research focuses on the historical development of women's sport in Britain. She has published extensively on women’s history sport, focusing particularly on interwar developments. She is Past Chair of the British Society of Sport History and until recently she also sat on the Executive Committees of Scottish Women in Sport and Women’s History Scotland. In 2014 she was named as a BBC Woman Expert for her research on women’s sport history. Steve Bolton: Steve researches and writes about the history of women’s football. Steve’s granny Lizzy Ashcroft was one of the most influential and important pre-WW2 amateur women footballers. She made her debut at the age of 16 for St Helens Ladies at St Andrews, Birmingham in April 1921 in front of a crowd of 30,000. After the English FA ban she joined the Dick Kerr Ladies in 1923 where she played until her retirement in 1935. She was Vice-Captain under her great friend Lily Parr from 1932-1934 and in 1935 took over the Captaincy from her great mate Lily and led the DKL on only their second ever continental tour. Steve is custodian of the Lizzy Ashcroft Collection which is one of the foremost collections of pre-WW2 women’s football memorabilia in private hands.

Fodens Ladies Research Team

The Fodens Ladies Research Team comprises of Team Leader Prof Dave Day and Research Assistants Lisa Taylor and Margaret Roberts - see individual author pages for more details The Team are keen to hear from anyone who has information, comment, memorabilia etc related to Fodens Ladies Football Team or their opponents. The Team can be contacted via email - contact@playingpasts.co.uk

Gary James

Gary James is a lecturer with International Sport and Leisure History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Since the 1980s, he has written extensively on football, with his current research focusing on female participation and interest in the sport. Since the 1990s, he has gathered oral testimony from female directors, administrative staff, ‘tea-ladies’, supporters, players, players’ wives, managers’ wives, media personnel, broadcasters, athletes and others with an interest in the game as players or spectators, and this forms part of a monograph he is producing on female participation and involvement. His latest research article has been on the origins of football and can be downloaded here

Gaz Shaw

Systems and Digital Media Officer and Research Associate at Manchester Metropolitan University. MA Sport History and Culture and BSc (Hons) Web Development alumnus at De Montfort University and Manchester Metropolitan University respectively.

Geoff Swallow

Geoff Swallow lives and works in St Ives, Cornwall. His MA dissertation was on early representations of surf bathing and surfing in the cultural construction of Cornwall. He is currently working on a part-time PhD at MMU on discourses of modernity, territory and identity on the West of England circuit of annual swimming matches between 1863 and 1913. His other research interests include the social and cultural history of sea bathing, surfing and water polo.

Gherardo Bonini

Gherardo graduated from the University of Florence after reading Moral Philosophy and also holds a Diploma in Archival, Paleography and Diplomacy from the State Archives of Florence, which he achieved in 1991. He has worked in the Historical Archives of the European Union since 1989 and since 2013 has been deputy director. His main area of study is European Sport between 1815-1945 with special emphasis on Austrian sport, weightlifting and swimming.

Glenn Piper

Glenn is a Primary School Teacher based in Manchester. He has worked with three schools to publish Centenary Histories based upon logbooks, admission registers and interviews. He has been involved in athletics for over thirty-five years. He is an experienced genealogist and he has researched the life of his great grandfather who ran for Sheffield United Harriers. His interest in family history and athletics led to further research on biographies of athletes in Victorian and Edwardian times. He has published books about athletics in Sheffield and Tameside, Greater Manchester, during this period.

Grace Huxford

Grace is a social and oral historian of modern Britain, with particular interests in the Cold War (1945-1991), the aftermath of the Second World War, the Korean War (1950-1953) and the social history of warfare. She is also interested in the histories of people touched indirectly by war, such as military families, and the long-term impact of conflict on memory, gender and selfhood. Grace is currently conducting an oral history of British military communities in Germany (1945-2000), exploring the experiences of service personnel, families and support workers living in bases. In 2019-20, Grace is an AHRC Leadership Fellow (early career), leading a major project on the social history of British Military Bases in Germany, supported by historian of war and gender, Dr Joel Morley. This project aims to engage with a purposefully wide range of perspectives on this history. See our project page for more information; britishbasesingermany.blog Prior to her arrival in Bristol in 2015, she was Research Fellow in Oral History at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, where she was also an Early Career Fellow. Grace received a PhD from the University of Warwick in 2015. Twitter - @Grace_Huxford

Hans Henrik Appel

Hans Henrik Appel is a Danish historian who currently specializes in the history of sport, leisure, entertainment and body culture from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Special studies include subjects such as early Danish football, dancing, circus, wax cabinets and cinemas, nudity and hygiene movements, fan culture, patterns of cultural consumption – and attempts to link as many of these subjects as possible. He obtained his doctor degree in history from University of Copenhagen in 1999, and has worked in several Danish museums. He has a special interest in football museums and has worked as a volunteer at the Manchester United museum. He writes the blog “Football and material culture” on British football museums and football grounds. Hans is deputy head of corps of external examiners in History at the universities in Denmark, and an associate of the Sports and Leisure History Research team.

Harry Morgan

Harry is an undergraduate student, studying history at the University of Chester. He enjoys sports and cultural history, and is a Liverpool FC fan. He intends to continue into postgraduate study, with a view to follow a career in teaching after graduating. Twitter @itsharrymorgan

Heather Roberts

Heather Roberts is a professional archivist. Currently with the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, she’s developing RNCM Archives’ service to inspire the Arts and generate interest in more of Manchester’s music-making history. She studied philosophy at university, so whilst she’s not a musician or a historian, she’s full of curiosity and questions and loves to share these with others. It’s the human stories and their beautiful art in the RNCM Archives that she finds so interesting. Previously she’s worked in archives of social and political movements, industrial heritage, community groups, performing arts and more. Alongside her work at the college, she runs her own business HerArchivist, helping primarily non-heritage organisations build their archives from scratch and better control their heritage collections.

Helge Faller

Helge studied religious education in Munich and history, politics and cultural science at Hagen Open University. He works as a teacher for religious education near Munich and is also trainer of girls’ and women’s football teams of the club FFC 07 bad Aibling which he co-founded in 2007. For 20 years he’s researching the history of women’s football and has written several books on the women’s football history in France (7), Belgium (2), Netherlands, Austria and Oceania as well as articles on that subject. Currently a three-volume statistical history of British women’s football, the seventh part of “Les Footballeuses” (French women’s football history) and the third part of the women’s football history of Belgium are in preparation. The author can be contacted via his publishing house Les Sports et la Femme www.lessportsetlafemme.de

Iain Adams

Iain Adams enjoyed voluntary severance from the University of Central Lancashire in January 2017. He was at UCLan for 20 years, initially as the Outdoor Education division leader at the Penrith Campus and latterly as the graduate research student coordinator. Previous to UCLan he was the Chief Pilot of Vectair Aviation and a Civil Aviation Authority pilot examiner. He has published several articles on football and the Great War and other research interests include sport and art, and sport aviation in Weimar Germany.

Ian Stone

Ian Stone has recently retired as a Professorial Fellow at Durham Business School, Durham University. Prior to this he was Director of the Entrepreneurship Centre at DUBS, and also Directed the Policy Research Group (St Chad's College, Durham). His academic interests focus upon entrepreneurship and regional business development. He has been Visiting Research Professor at HEC, Montreal and Plymouth University, and Visiting Research Fellow at UK Commission for Employment and Skills. Ian has undertaken a large body of research for government departments and agencies, and has acted as a policy advisor both in the UK and overseas. His work relating to the field of sport has included work on its role in regional development (including a specific study of the effect of Durham CCC), while his interest in history is reflected in his PhD in that field. He has, since 2010, been working on the life of Alec Nelson - an interest he pursues along with Dave Day - and his contribution to the Colloquium arises out of his ongoing research into Nelson's life and career. Email: i.e.stone@durham.ac.uk

Imogen Allen

Imogen Allen is an undergraduate studying history at the University of Chester. Her special interest is in the history of medicine and society and she intends to carry on her studies to a postgraduate level. She enjoys attending the university choir and researching royal palaces in her spare time. Twitter - @thehistorybug

James Copley

James originates from Sunderland but has strong family ties in Wales. He recently completed a degree in History at the University of Swansea and is currently studying towards a Masters in Sports Journalism at the University of Sunderland. James loves the history of sort and the narratives they provide. He is a firm believer that through the lens of sport we can view the subtle nuisances of society.​

James Ormandy

Jim Ormandy is a retired college principal who worked in sixth form education teaching Business Studies and Economics both in the UK and Bangladesh. He finished his teaching career providing management training in the Middle East. Having a passion for playing and coaching hockey and having a degree in Economic & Social History he has recently completed an on-line Sports History MA with De Montfort University where his research interest was the history of hockey from a northern perspective. Published article: Men’s Hockey in Cheshire before 1914 Cheshire History Journal 2020.

James Rhodes

James Rhodes is a solicitor by profession but is also an enthusiastic writer and blogger on history. He has a particular interest in local history (Leeds/Yorkshire) and the history of sport, specialising in cricket during the two World Wars. On Facebook and Twitter, James publishes an ‘On This Day in Leeds’ story every day and tweets about the history of wartime cricket. He publishes longer posts on his blog once or twice a week.

Jan Luitzen

Jan Luitzen (1960) is a teacher-linguist at the Sports, Management & Business programme of Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences; he takes a Ph D track at Radboud University, Nijmegen, on education and sports in 19th c. Dutch private school Noorthey. Together with a.o. Pascal Delheye he has published on the history of Dutch cricket and lawntennis in The International Journal in the History of Sports, and has recently contributed to The Journal of Olympic History. Together, Luitzen and Zonneveld published (2017) on ‘the visual turn’, presenting studies of end of 19th c. sports photography, in De Moderne Tijd and Ex Tempore; and on the topic presented here. They are also editors of theDeSportwereld magazine for Dutch sports history. www.desportwereld.nl 
janluitzen@gmail.com

Janice Li

Janice Li is a research assistant to Dr. Carla Nappi, Canada Research Chair, at the University of British Columbia, and a curatorial assistant at Richmond Museum & Heritage Services in BC, Canada. Janice is interested in cultural and visual history of 19th century London and Paris, particularly in exhibitions, popular media, and leisure activities. Email: janicecyli@gmail.com Twitter: @janicecyli

Jean Williams

Jean is Professor of Sport at the University of Woverhamption and heritage consultant at JJ Heritiage. Email - jean@jjheritage.com

Jean-François Loudcher

Jean-François has been a lecturer at University of Franche-Comté since 1997, since then he has been promoted as Professor at University of Bordeaux in 2016 (September). His work deal with history of Physical Education (PE) in France, body techniques, image analysis, violence, Olympics and sport history (including studies of France, United Kingdom and Switzerland). He has experience of teaching at different levels (undergraduate and graduate) in educational sport sciences, management, sports coaching and sport for disabled people. Since his certification in 2002, he has been investigating sport processes as civilisation and cultural phenomenon. He has developed Foucauldian theories to understand the history of boxing, but also Elias’s theory and included different Anglo-Saxon approaches (Guttmann, Eichberg, Krueger, Szymanski…). As part of his work to understand resistance to involvement in ‘sportivisation’, he has been developing research on “soule” (Folk-football) since 2006, as well as on “catch” (sport spectacle), MMA, coaching, sport policy in the city, French and European influences on Senegalese wrestling and interactions between France and Japan in the XIXth century. He has published 9 books, 31 peer-reviewed papers, 60 chapters of books and 40 professional papers…. During his time at University of Franche-Comté, he was responsible for International relationships and for a Master programme in Educational Sciences in Sport. At Bordeaux, he is in charge of the topic of Diversity inside the LACES (Laboratoire Culture, Education, Société) which is a multidisciplinary research department (English Civilization, Educational Sciences and Sport)., United Kingdom and Switzerland). Since his certification in 2002, he has been investigating sport processes as civilization and cultural phenomenon. He has published 9 books, 31 peer-reviewed papers, 60 chapters of books and 40 professional papers.

Jeffrey Hill

Jeffrey Hill is Emeritus Professor of Historical and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University where, until 2007, he was Director of the International Centre for Sport, History and Culture. His research interests include the cultural history of sport and leisure, and popular politics in Britain. He has published Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth Century Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Sport and the Literary Imagination: essays in history, literature, and sport (Peter Lang, 2006). Sport: A Historical Introduction is due from Palgrave Macmillan in late 2010. With Anthony Bateman he has edited the Cambridge Companion to Cricket for CUP (to be published March 2011) and he is also working on a study of popular politics and culture in north-west England from the 1880s to the 1930s.

Jeremy Lonsdale

Jeremy Lonsdale has been following Yorkshire CCC since the early 1970s and researching its history for many years. His interests are in the social history of how the game developed in the county in the 19th century, and how the county club became a major sporting force in the 20th century. He is currently finalising a biography of the Yorkshire and England professional Tom Emmett, and writing a study on how cricket at levels in Yorkshire carried on during the First World War. His previous cricket book was a biography of the multi-talented Victorian sportsman, Brig-Gen R.M.Poore - entitled 'The Army's Grace: The life of Brigadier-General R.M.Poore (Spellmount, 1992)

Jodie Neville

Jodie Neville is a collaborative PhD researcher with Manchester Metropolitan University and the National Football Museum. The aims of her project can be split into two interconnected areas. The first is to reveal, record, and represent early women sports coaches. The second is to explore how the social practice intangible cultural heritage characteristics of coaching, along with the masculine values at its core, have contributed to the marginalisation of women in these sporting roles. Twitter: @JodieNeville | @sportscoachhist LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jlneville Email: jodie.neville2@stu.mmu.ac.uk Member: British Society for Sports History, International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport, Women’s History Network

Joe Pryle

Joe is a PhD researcher and academic within the School of Sport and Wellbeing at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. In addition, he is a cricket coach with experience across 20 years, including periods in the USA (Los Angeles) and Australia. His primary research approach is through ethnography, and his MA utilised participant observation to uncover school cricket cultures. His PhD draws on time playing cricket in the USA to conduct ethnography into the field of Californian cricket culture.

John Bale

John Bale is Emeritus Professor of Sports Studies at Keele University. He has authored several books and numerous articles on various aspects of sport. He has a particular interest in written and visual representations, exemplified by his Imagined Olympians (University of Minnesota Press), Roger Bannister and the Four Minute Mile (Routledge), Running Cultures (Routledge) and Anti-Sport Sentiments in Literature (Routledge). He is currently writing a book on Lewis Carroll and his engagements with sports.

John Daniels

John was born in 1943 in South London and spent a large part of his life obsessively collecting football memorabilia, now in his self proclaimed dotage he decided to dispose of his collection as he thought it not be fair to leave such a large quantity of acquisitions for his family to dispose of when the big referee in the sky sent him for an early bath. In more recent years, due to his daughter’s involvement in cricket, John has spent most of his spare time supporting various projects in Bexley promoting cricket for girls. The profits from all 3 books are being donated to support the girls’ cricket projects. John's professional life has been pretty mundane, he thinks - Telegram boy, Post office counter clerk, Cable and Wireless, The Army and various low level communications occupations (remember communications before it became I.T. ??). He has also managed to fit in a small (mainly part time) business dealing in football memorabilia. His books are not, he says, Harry Potter or William Shakespeare but they have done what they set out to do. The first one documented his obsession with collecting before the collection was disposed of. The second one diarised a season following a local non-league football club with terrific photographs by a friend who is an award winning photographer and the third one was back to the collecting theme by illustrating over 200 football postcards that he once owned.

John Dewhirst

John Dewhirst is a self-employed accountant who lives in Shipley. A longstanding Bradford City supporter, he co-launched The City Gent fanzine in 1984 and has been involved in producing a number of books about the history of the club. He is currently working on a history of the Wool City Rivalry between Bradford City and Bradford Park Avenue in the Football League. A former racing cyclist, he holds all the senior time trial records of the East Bradford Cycling Club. John's log is at www.johndewhirst.blog with links to his features published online on other sites.

Jon Hughes

Dr Jon Hughes is Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. His wide-ranging research interests lie in the field of modern German and Austrian literature and film, in particular of the interwar period (1918-1939), and in cultural and media responses to sport and leisure in the German-speaking countries. He recently published Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany (Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics, 2017), which examines the cultural, social and political significance of the legendary German boxer. It was described in the Journal of Sport History as a 'probing, balanced treatment of how the world’s nascent mass media presented one of its original international celebrity athletes’. Current projects include a re-assessment of the work of the Austrian-Jewish sports journalist Willy Meisl, and a study of the representation of leisure in German film of the 1920s and 1930s. Listen to Jon discuss his research here https://alondonjournal.net/2019/08/03/sport-in-history-podcast-8-dr-jon-hughes/

Jurryt van de Vooren

Jurryt van de Vooren is a sports historian. Author of the Bosatlas of Dutch football. His interests include all sports connected with Amsterdam. His claim to fame otherwise is that he is - still - the only Amsterdammer who graduated from Feyenoord.

Justyna Włodarczyk

Justyna Włodarczyk received her PhD in American literature from the University of Warsaw (UW). She also holds an MA degree in cultural studies from the College of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities at the UW. She currently is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies at the UW. She is an alumnus of the Fulbright program and worked on her doctoral dissertation as a junior Fulbright scholar at the University of Indianapolis. Her current research project concerns the history of animal training discourse read through a biopolitical framework. She is co-author of Free-Market Dogs: The Human-Canine Bond in Contemporary Poland (Purdue, 2016). Email: j.wlodarczyk@uw.edu.pl​

Kamil Potrzuski

Kamil was born in 1987. In 2011, he received a master’s degree at the University of Warsaw, Faculty of History. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw and works as an academic teacher and researches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Sport of the Jozef Pilsudski Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw. His research is focused on the history of sport of the interwar period.

Katie Holmes

Katie Holmes is an independent researcher and self-employed charity consultant from Nottingham. She became a runner in her late forties and loves racing and parkrun. Her research interests are the history of women’s endurance running and gathering contemporary experiences of older female runners. She has a special interest in gathering first person accounts relating to the subjects she researches and is driven by a desire to capture stories which might otherwise be lost. www.RunYoung50.co.uk Twitter: @RunYoung50 Facebook: RunYoung50 Instagram: @RunYoung50 LinkedIn: Katie Holmes

Keith Myerscough

Keith is an independent scholar and Research Associate Member with SpLiesH at MMU. His research interests focus on commercial swimming in Victorian Lancashire, and the development of basketball in the USA and UK.

Kevin Neill

Kevin is an independent scholar who was born in 1955 in Nottingham. An avid Nottingham Forest supporter, he attended Canley Teacher Training College Coventry between 1973-76. Sport has been a central tenet of Kevin’s life. Appointed Physical Education teacher in 1977 at the Penistone Grammar School South Yorkshire, becoming Head of Sixth Form and Assistant Headteacher. He retired after thirty five years and is now living in the South of France with wife Julie-Ann. Kevin's son Alex from a previous marriage is currently working in Beijing for the Chinese Olympic Committee as a Performance Coach. Previously a member of BSSH and has co-written with Graham Curry two other published articles on South Yorkshire footballers.

Lawrence Davies

Lawrence Davies is a Welsh boxing historian, the author of Mountain Fighters: Lost Tales of Welsh Boxing and Jack Scarrott's Prize Fighters. His groundbreaking work has served as the basis of a TV documentary and numerous newspaper articles. His current book, The Story of Welsh Boxing is based on meticulous original research has uncovered many Welsh prize fighters previously unrecorded in any publication.

Leslie Crang

Leslie is presently completing his Msc Sport Management and the Business of Football at Birkbeck (part-time). Previously he has spoken at Birkbeck Sports Business Centre entitled 1966 and All That : A Cultural & Social Reflection on England’s World Cup Victory as well as organising a symposium in June last year entitled More Than Just A Game: the Legacy of the 1966 Football World Cup. On the 27th of June gave a talk at the SportsBusiness on the 30th anniversary of the Rugby World Cup. He also recently gave a paper at the The British Society of Sport History (BSSH) Annual Conference & Post-Graduate Symposium 2017 on his thesis project ‘CS Lebowski: Punk football in Italy - new paradigm of the old model reinvented?’ Leslie works at Senate House Library, University of London in the collection management team. Email - l_crang@hotmail.com Twitter - @morethanagame66

Liam Dyer

Liam gained his PhD from Manchester Metropolitan Uni in 2019, his thesis - The London and North Western Railway Company and the Crewe Alexandra Athletic Club in the Late Victorian and Edwardian Periods - focused on railway company paternalism in the town of Crewe, where the university’s Cheshire campus was based during Liam's studies,, as well as the influence of the local middle class on the development of sport within the town and on the national stage. Liam has also written about the development of the railway socially, economically and culturally and its impact on Britain as well as the development of amateur sport during the nineteenth century.

Lisa Jenkel

Lisa Jenkel has recently graduated from the Research Master: Modern History and International Relations at the University of Groningen. In her graduation thesis she has focused on the migration of German-Jewish sportsmen and -women during National Socialism. Her research on sports history mostly combines Jewish and Women’s studies with aspects of sports’ past in order to analyse which cultural and societal influence sport posed for these groups.

Lisa Taylor

Lisa completed an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD between Manchester Metropolitan University and the River & Rowing Museum, Henley-on-Thames in 2020. Using a combination of archival research and oral histories with former international athletes, her thesis traces a narrative course through British women’s experiences of international rowing in the second half of the twentieth century. She has published on the development of women’s rowing in Britain from the late nineteenth century, but is primarily interested in the sport as a context in which to explore post-war social, cultural and gender history. An experienced oral historian, she is also interested in the dynamics of oral history encounters and how these influence the writing and understanding of history.

Luke J Harris

Luke J. Harris is an academic researcher who completed his PhD at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2013. His book, ‘Britain and the Olympic Games, 1908-1920’(2015) was published with Palgrave MacMillan and won the International society for Olympic Historians Karl Lennartz Memorial book award for the outstanding book upon the Olympic Games or Movement for 2015. His main research interests are the Olympic Games, nationalism, British identity, Sports Journalism, the development of modern athletics, athletic coaching and development, football and the depictions of sport within the British boys story press during the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s. He is the author of numerous book and journal chapters.

Lydia Robinson

Lydia is an undergraduate student, studying history at the University of Chester. Her special interests include youth fashion, and music culture. After graduation, she is hoping to complete a PGCE in History, with the aim to become a history teacher in a secondary school.

Malcolm Shifrin

28 years a professional librarian—one of a now critically government-endangered species—Malcolm started in a school, eventually becoming Head of the Inner London Education Authority’s innovative Central Library Resources Service. After a Thatcher-induced early retirement in 1985, he discovered the popular Victorian institution of the Turkish bath, and needing guidance in the ways of historians, completed an MA in modern history at Royal Holloway University of London in 1996/7. Malcolm’s book Victorian Turkish Baths (Historic England, 2015; University of Chicago Press, 2016), is the only one on the subject, complementing his website www.victorianturkishbath.org now in its seventeenth year.

Marco Giani

Marco Giani is an History & Geography teacher in a middle school in Milan; during his free time, he still researches on the Renaissance Political Thought & Language and (starting from 2017) on Women & Sports during the Fascist era. After completed a first- and then a second-level degree in Italian Language & Literature in Milan (Università degli Studi), he moved to Venice (Università Ca’ Foscari) to obtain a PhD in the same subject. His PhD thesis was a linguistic analysis of the political lexicon of Paolo Paruta, the 16th century Public Historian of the Republic of Venice. Thanks to his formation, he’s able to analyses political texts, focusing on the key-words and on their historical meaning. Lately, he started to study the history of Gruppo Femminile Calcistico, the first women’s football club in Italy, in the wider context of the many-sided connection between Fascism and women’s sport, focusing his attention on the mass-media representation of calciatrici. Website: https://unive.academia.edu/MarcoGiani Marco is a member of SISS (Società Italia di Storia dello Sport, Italian Society for Sports History - see http://www.societaitalianastoriasport.it

Marco Impiglia

Born in Rome on August 20, 1960. As a young man Marco lived in Algeria and in Mozambique. He speaks Portuguese, French, Spanish, English. Marco has a Bachelor's degree in Literature Modern, contemporary historical address, obtained at the II University of Rome of Tor Vergata July 15, 1991, with a vote of 110/110 cum laude. His thesis discussed with Prof. Francesco Piva: "Sport and after work in fascist Italy ”. Marco has been employed as a freelance journalist since 1993, registered with the Order of the Journalists from Lazio since 12 October 1998. He has published several hundred articles for newspapers such as: Corriere dello Sport-Stadio, La Gazzetta dello Sport, Il Messaggero, L'Unità, la Repubblica, Italian Sport, Sport Europe, Il Podio, Lancillotto and Nausica, Capitolium, Roman Voice, Guerin Sportivo, La Roma, Latium, Red & Yellow, Newsport, Cycling, Bicisport, Athletics, Tambourine, SPQR Sport, Rugby Club, Seconds Out, Boxing Ring. Find Marco on Twitter - @leto1960

Margaret Roberts

Margaret is a highly experienced and well-respected genealogist, who also works with academics, researchers, PhD students and families both at home and abroad to help uncover many forms of sporting past. Margaret is the Editor-in-Chief of Playing Pasts and has curated the Sport and Leisure History Archive at MMU Cheshire. Margaret is also currently employed as a Research Assistant for Prof Dave Day with a particular emphasis on developing the Playing Pasts "Focus on Fodens" project Follow her on twitter - @Researchdogbody

Marjet Derks

Marjet is currently Professor of Sport History at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. She studied history at the Radboud, where she specialised in the history of sport, popular culture and religious history. She was one of the first Dutch historians to publish about the history of sport, mainly in relation to religion. She has worked at the Netherlands Sportmuseum in Lelystad and in 1995 set up the Stichting Echo with two colleagues, which is an independent association for the stimulating of historical research on religion. Since 2006, she has been a teacher and researcher attached to the History Department of Radboud and since 2010 in the field of Cultural history. Derks’ research focuses on the history of sport and bodily culture in particular from a cultural historical and gender perspective.

Mark Evans

Mark Evans is a retired Police Officer who has an interest in the history of all sports particularly hockey, athletics, swimming and sport in Manchester. Since retirement Mark has became a volunteer with the National Hockey Museum who are based in Woking, Surrey. He has conducted research for them in relation to the history of the English Cup, ladies league hockey and hockey at the Olympics. He is Chair of Radcliffe Swimming and Water Polo Club and still active in a number of sports. He is currently conducting further research into the development of ladies league hockey.

Mark Rowe

Since he left the University of Bristol in 1989 with a first in history, Mark Rowe has worked as a print journalist, apart from 1998 when he worked in Sydney as a dish-washer and then travelled around Australia and New Zealand. His books include one on cricket, The Victory Tests: England v Australia 1945 (2010). He edits the Lives in Cricket series for the Association of Cricket Statisticians.

Martyn Cooke

Martyn is a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant (PTA) and part-time PhD student at the Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) where he is affiliated with the Department of Exercise and Sport Science. His current research is examining the development of association football in Britain during the nineteenth century with a particular focus on the emergence of the game in North Staffordshire and ‘The Potteries’. He has published several academic papers, most notably in Soccer and Society and Sport in History, has presented his work at a variety of conferences in Britain, North America and Europe whilst his PhD set to be submitted in September 2021. Prior to starting his career in academia Martyn spent a decade operating in the sport and leisure industry where he held coaching, sport development and managerial positions at a variety of sports clubs and organisations

Melanie Tebbutt

I am a specialist in British social and cultural history whose published books range from the history of pawnbroking and working-class credit, to gossip and social relationships in working-class neighbourhoods and the leisure identities of youth in the 1920s and 1930s. University/AHRC research leave in 2009/10 enabled me to complete Being Boys: Youth Leisure and Identity in the Inter-war Years (Manchester University Press, 2012). Since then I have been involved in several history-based community engagement projects with local communities in North West England, all of which have been defined by the importance of young people telling their own stories. AHRC Follow-on Funding, The Passions of Youth, 2014-15, allowed me to apply some of the findings of Being Boys work, by working with local artists, youth work practitioners and educationalists to explore changes and continuities of working-class boys and young men over the past sixty years. Other projects, such as the film, Forever Young, have explored childhood and the teen years from the perspective of older participants. Returning Home, another film-based project, with the North West Film Archive, is researching the repercussions and emotional implications of ‘delicate’ children’s recuperative holidays with foster families in Switzerland after the Second World War and placing this research within the context of the broader international context of similar humanitarian initiatives. See my profile at MMU for more information - https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/hpp/staff/profile/index.php?id=82

Mike Fishpool

Michael has spent nearly three decades working in media and publishing-related roles, graduating from the Aberystwyth University in the 1990s after reading international politics. He has since studied at Birkbeck, University of London, recently gaining an MA Historical Research. His dissertation looked at attitudes towards women’s cycle racing and its development in the UK, France and the United States during the late 19th Century, building on a long-term interest in professional and amateur cycle racing.

Mike Huggins

Mike is emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cumbria and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow and President of the European Committee for Sports History, and on the editorial consultancy boards of five peer-reviewed academic leisure and sports history journals in Britain, France, the USA and South America. He is a former Senior Review Editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport and a former Chair of the North American Society for Sport History Book Award Committee. Winner of the prestigious NASSH book award in 2000 for the best book on sport history published that year and was given the International Society for Sport History and Physical Education Award in 2009 for his ‘outstanding scientific contribution to the history of sport’. He delivered the Sir Derek Birley Memorial Lecture at the British Society for Sports History Conference at Swansea University in 2015 and is a long-standing member of the CESH Scientific Committees which oversees their annual congresses and was elected it's President at the 2018 congress.

Mike Tripp

Mike Tripp is an independent researcher having retired in 2012 from the University College of St Mark and St John, Plymouth (now the University of St Mark and St John), where he taught the history, politics and sociology of sport. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Exeter in 2010 with a thesis entitled, The Persistence of Difference: a History of Cornish Wrestling. Since retiring from lecturing he has continued his research into the history of Cornish wrestling, contributing articles in several publications. He has recently completed a book based on his thesis, which awaits publication.

Nick Piercey

Nick studied history at UCL and gained his PhD in Dutch Cultural History in 2011 with a thesis on football in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. He has taught courses on Dutch, Belgian and sporting history and is currently an Honorary Research Associate at UCL. His first book about sport and historiography, entitled ‘Four Histories about early Dutch football, 1910-1920’ was published in October 2016 and is available as a free Open Access download via UCL Press.

Noemi García-Arjona

Noemi García-Arjona is temporary assistant at the Sports Sciences Faculty (STAPS) of the University of Franche-Comté and carries out her research at the "Culture, sport, health and society" laboratory (Laboratoire C3S). She is interesting in the educative and integrative value of sport for ethnic minorities in sport clubs and institutional initiatives of migration contexts from a political point of view. As well she has worked on the historical perspective of Spanish and French comic publications and its relation with sport, leisure and the transmission of cultural patterns and values to young readers.

Olivia Ignatowicz

Olivia is a second-year undergraduate student studying history and archaeology at the University of Chester. She is interested in modern, social and cultural history. Olivia is currently planning her third-year dissertation topic on the Holocaust and is considering doing postgraduate study involving history

Paolo Bruschi

Paolo Bruschi was born in Florence in 1967 and lives in Empoli. He is graduated in Political Science – specialising in contemporary history – from the University of Florence, where he also got a master degree in Industrial Relations, with a semester abroad at the University of Warwick (GB). After graduation, he worked for Italian General Confederation of Labour (CGIL) as a trade union history lecturer in the courses for shopstewards. Since 2000, he is in charge of Vocational training and Public employment agency sector at the Province of Florence, then at Tuscany Regional Government. As such, he developed and practiced skills in lecturing and guiding adults and high-school students. He has also originated a brief course about the XX century through the inspirational stories of men and women competing with major historical events in the background, giving talks to students from primary to high school. He is a member of Società Italiana di Storia dello Sport (https://www.storiasport.com/) and blogs about sport, history and society at http://www.gonews.it/blog/essere-campioni-e-un-dettaglio/, contributes to il manifesto (http://ilmanifesto.info/) and its weekly supplement Alias (http://ilmanifesto.info/sezioni/alias/). In november 2018, he published the book “Essere campioni è un dettaglio”, a collection of short stories about the XXth century at the fine line between sport, history and society.

Paul Newsham

Paul Newsham is a lecturer at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His research interests include the history of sporting song, fan culture and Polish - British sporting relations. newshp@wa.amu.edu.pl

Peter Jones

Pete is 23 and from Liverpool and has recently finished his MA in History, specialising in football history. He is trying to get into a career involved with football history and has written for many websites and magazines. He is hoping to continue learning in this area through a PhD or by becoming a researcher for other people in this field. He is very keen for any help anyone could provide in aiding his career path. If you want to email him his email is: peter.k.j@hotmail.com his Twitter handle is: @PeterKennyJones or to view more of his work please visit his website: https://peterkj.wixsite.com/football-historian

Peter Lovesey

Peter’s lifelong interest in the history of athletics resulted in his first book, The Kings of Distance, appearing as long ago as 1968 and was also the trigger for his career as a writer. In 1970 he entered and won a first crime novel contest with a whodunnit called Wobble to Death based on a Victorian six-day ‘go-as-you-please’ race. Although best-known for his fiction, he has found time to publish numerous articles and several books on athletics. With national coach Tom McNab he compiled a bibliography, The Guide to British Track and Field Literature 1275 to 1968, which was expanded thirty years later at the suggestion of the British Library to become An Athletics Compendium (2001). He also wrote the Official Centenary History of the Amateur Athletic Association (1979). Website: www.peterlovesey.com

Peter Swain

Peter Swain is Visiting Researcher at the University of Bolton’s Centre for Worktown Studies and is currently writing a history of the University. He is a social and cultural historian and he has published widely, being a major contributor to the current debate surrounding the history of association football in the nineteenth century. His recent research includes pedestrianism, crown green bowling, dance in the nineteenth century and women’s participation in sport in the inter-war years, particularly surrounding a distinctive local variant of the game of rounders, and he is awaiting publication of his monograph The Golden Age of Cinema-Going in Bolton.

Petra Tabarelli

Petra Tabarelli is an independent sports historian and also director of the Bingen Archive. Her focus is on the development of football rules and how football came to Germany. She works for the IFAB and the DFB referee newspaper, among others, and is a juror for the German Academy for Football Culture and the History Competition of the Federal President (Rhineland-Palatinate). Twitter handle - @ClioMZ

Phil Brennan

Rachel Harris-Gardiner

Rachel is the editor of Speedqueens women's motorsport - www.speedqueens.blogspot.com and can be found on twitter at @rachelwaxinglyr

Ray Hulley

Ray Hulley DMS is a retired senior Home Office official with a management services background in Prison, Police, Fire, Immigration, Magistrates’ courts and Forensic Science Services. He has been a family historian for over 30 years and he has written several articles for the Guild of One-Name Studies, the North Cheshire Family History Society and the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society journals as well as a book covering the history of a Hulley family. He was granted a Fellowship by the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society in May 2001 for his voluntary work at the Public Record Office in London and at The National Archives at Kew. He has been working on John Hulley’s founding role in the 19th century Olympic movement since 2001

Ray Physick

Ray’s PhD research covered how football in Britain had been represented in fine art. Using the skills acquired during the research Ray returned to his original area of research, the Spanish Civil War. Recently an article assessing the programmatic detail contained in Civil War posters has been completed and submitted for publication. Significant research into the importance of sport during the Second Republic resulted in an article about the Olimpiada Popular; this was subsequently published in Sport in History. Current research is looking at the Batallón Deportivo, FC Barcelona’s football tour of Mexico and the USA in 1937, as well as a similar tour undertaken by a Basque football team during the Civil War period.

Richard Tisdale

Richard is a BBC producer and journalist working in news and current affairs with a passion for history and science. His blog finds the most interesting tales from the British Newspaper Archive which covers the 17th – 20th Century. They are an extraordinary record of the past and the stories within them are fascinating and often sensationalist, biased, amusing, sad, and most definitely surprising . Richard trawls the papers and pieces together the stories of people that he finds, many of these stories he tells on BBC Radio Shropshire.

Rob Grillo

Rob Grillo is the author of a number of sports history related books centred on the Bradford & Keighley regions of West Yorkshire. He has also penned the Amazon bestsellers ‘Anoraknophobia’ (a tale of sporting obsession) and ‘Is That The 12” Remix?’, which covers his other passion, 80s music. A keen long-distance runner, Rob has also written about his exploits (and mishaps) along the way in his 280 mile journey along the Pennine Way.A graduate of Sociology at Loughborough University, Rob is currently head of Geography in a Bradford High School.Website: www.robgrillo.co.ukTwitter: @RobGrillo

Rob Hess

Associate Professor Rob Hess, a Fellow and past president of the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH), is the co-author of Play On! The Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football, which won the biennial ASSH book prize in 2017. He has served as managing editor of the International Journal of the History of Sport and is now the regional editor for Africa, Australasia and the Pacific with that journal. He has also taught sport history in the College of Sport and Exercise at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, for more than 20 years.

Robert J. Lake

Robert J. Lake is an Instructor in the Department of Sport Science at Douglas College, Canada. His main research interests are in tennis, around historically-rooted social issues related to: social class, exclusion and behavioural etiquette; gender and sexuality; race, nationalism and English/British national identity; and, coaching, talent development and policy. He authored A Social History of Tennis in Britain, which won the 2015 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize awarded by the British Society of Sports History, and has written over a dozen articles in the leading journals in sport history and sociology, including: Journal of Sport History, Sport in History, International Journal of the History of Sport, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and Sport in Society.

Roger Titford

After taking a history degree Roger spent a career in commerce. Now quasi-retired, he is delighted to combine his loves of history and football statistics to reveal unusual or untold stories of the game. The Lost Years of Reading FC was a comprehensive reassessment of the club’s early history based on original source materials and setting its development firmly in the surrounding sporting and social contexts. The Legend of Robin Friday carefully unpicked the cultural threads that created the myths around this Fourth Division footballer, while Roy Bentley’s Stationary Club was a unique 360 degree look at an ordinary lower division side performing averagely throughout the 1960s, based on newspaper reports, interviews and financial analysis. Roger writes regularly for the monthly magazine When Saturday Comes and appears in several other publications and podcasts. He is currently musing on the unappreciated strengths of professional football in the South prior to 1920. The Strange Death of Women’s Football in 1921 is available from the When Saturday Comes website at: shop.wsc.co.uk under Other Books and has its own Twitter handle @Women1921.

Roy Case

Roy Case was born in Nottinghamshire at the start of the Second World War. He retired from work at the age of 55 in order to devote his time to his true passion for sport. In 1982 he founded the McGregor Trophy, which was later adopted by England Golf, as the English Boys [Under 16] Open Amateur Stroke-play Championship. Case was presented with the Gerald Micklem Award for outstanding service to amateur golf in the Millennium year, and was elected President of England Golf in 2008. A keen follower of cricket, he is a member of the Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians.

Samantha-Jayne Oldfield

Samantha-Jayne Oldfield is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is a core member of the university’s International Sport and Leisure History group (SpLeisH). Her research interests and publications surround Victorian and Edwardian sport, and the uncovering of hidden life stories through varied biographical methods. She can be contacted at s.j.oldfield@mmu.ac.uk.

Sean Buckelew

Sean is presently working towards his PhD in U.S. History (1867-Present). His MA was in History, 2015 San Diego State University; BA, Theater, University of Southern Mississippi. Sean's research interests include popular culture and sporting culture in late twentieth-century America as well as left-wing theater movements in interwar America. He is studying under the direction of Dr. Andrew P. Haley. Sean is currently working on preliminary research into race and gender dynamics in southern professional wrestling. Sean is also interested in museum design. His previous experience includes participation in the design of the 2014 Sunshine and Superheroes exhibition for the Oakland Museum of California.

Sean Kelly

Sean is a MA student with the History Dept at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). He is working on a biography of Sylvia Gore based on the collection held at MMU Cheshire, Sport and Leisure History Research Archive

Sébastien Laffage-Cosnier

Sébastien Laffage-Cosnier is Lecturer at the University of Franche-Comté. He carries out his research in the "Culture, sport, health and society" research laboratory (Laboratoire C3S) around three main themes. First, he works on visual history in sport and social sciences. He explores the links between bodily practices and their artistic representations (posters, photographs, postcards, etc.). He also studies children's culture (comics, toys, cartoons, etc.) to understand how, depending on the periods, youth has been sensitized to sport. Finally, he is interested in the history of physical education, in particular the mechanisms for the creation and the dissemination of school innovations.

Sevket Akyildiz

My current (historical, social and political) interdisciplinary research areas cover social and cultural change and globalisation: in (1) Soviet-era Central Asia (2) contemporary British-European Mosques and Muslims living in seaside towns/resort towns/coastal towns. My focus is on historical and contemporary issues and themes. My research methods are critical analysis, online, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. My PhD thesis title: 'Implementing a Vision of Citizenship in Soviet Uzbekistan: Theory, Social Issues, and Education' (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.) Sevket and several academic and postgraduate colleagues have established the Eurasia Studies Society of Great Britain & Europe (Tess GB+Europe) and the The Eurasia Studies Society Online Journal.

Simon Eaves

Dr Simon J. Eaves is a senior lecturer in sports coaching and performance analysis at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has been actively researching the history of lawn tennis for the past decade, and has recently had accepted for publication several articles relating to early working-class tennis professional players; the Lawn Tennis Reform Committee (LTRC); and the internationalisation of lawn tennis. He is currently working on the emergence of lawn tennis coaches, the origins of the Davis Cup, and a biography of 19th century lawn tennis player, and internationalist, Dr Wilberforce Vaughan Eaves.

SpLeisH Research Team

Steve Atkinson

Steve Bolton

Steve Bolton - Women’s Football Historian and Consultant Email: lizzyashcroftfootballer@gmail.comTwitter: @DagenhamInvince I research and write about the history of women’s football. I have published a number of articles on the Playing Pasts and Football and War Online History Sites. I am credited as Producer and Historian for the film ‘Granny’, which is a 12 minute short film about my International footballing grandmother, Lizzy Ashcroft. Lizzy played for St Helens Ladies FC and the Dick Kerr Ladies from 1921-1935. I co-curated the innovative, mobile museum exhibition about the Rutherglen Ladies FC for the Scottish National Football Museum with Professor Fiona Skillen. I contributed to the Scottish Football Documentary “Sadie Smith” as a football history expert with Professor Skillen. I am credited as Historical Consultant for the groundbreaking play “Invincibles” by Amanda Whittington which tells the unknown story of the most famous women’s football team of WW1, the Sterling Ladies FC of Dagenham, the ‘Dagenham Invincibles.’ I am also the custodian of the ‘Lizzy Ashcroft Collection’ which is one of the foremost archives of early women’s football history.

Steve Greenfield

Steve Greenfield is a Professor of Sports Law and Practice within the Law School at the University of Westminster. He has written widely on many aspects of the regulation of sport, contractual terms and conditions and the impact of child protection legislation and policy. His work seeks to analyse and explain the role of law within sport applying a socio legal and/or historical framework. The most recent example (with Osborn and Rossouw) is ‘Beyond Kolpak: European Union Law’s Unforeseen Contribution to the Movement of African Cricketers’ (IHJS 2016 Vol 33). He is currently working on project based on archive material at Haileybury School exploring the early development and regulation of public school football. He is also working on a book Regulating Youth Sport for Routledge.

Stijn Knuts

Stijn Knuts studied cultural and global history at the KU Leuven (Belgium). Working as a research and teaching assistant at the KU Leuven’s Policy in Sports & Physical Activity Research Group, he obtained his PhD in kinesiology in 2014 with a dissertation on the social and cultural history of cycling in Belgium before the Second World War. He has published extensively on labour relations, transnational dynamics and national identity formation in Belgian sports and especially cycling in international scientific journals such as History Workshop Journal and the European Review of History. Between 2014 and 2016, he worked as a fellow at Ghent University’s Centre for Local Politics, where he wrote a book on the history of the Christian labour movement in the Ghent area. Currently, he is a research fellow at the KU Leuven’s Policy in Sports & Physical Activity Research Group. .

Stuart Gibbs

A Graduate of Glasgow School of Art, Stuart has participated in exhibitions focusing on women’s football history, these included Moving the Goalposts, First Ladies of Football and a Game for Girls. He has written articles on subjects such as Art, Theatre, and Sports History for Mainly Museums, Discover Magazine, and Playing Pasts. Stuart is also a volunteer researcher with Kent University and was part of the Great War Theatre, Mapping Irish Football and Miracle Workers, research projects. He has contributed to MG Alba’s Honeyballers and Rose Reilly documentaries, and the Futures Theatre Production Offside. He was also involved with women’s football as part of the back room staff at Glasgow City FC and Queens Park WFC until 2019. Contact Stuart via - Twitter @toad68   Facebook; www.facebook.com/stuart.gibbes.399 Linkedin; https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuart-gibbs-aab42825/

Stuart Sweeney

After a decade teaching Maths, Stuart became interested in applying Maths to business problems and joined NatWest. Having played local league table tennis up to the 1980’s, since retiring, Stuart has started playing again in the Central London Table Tennis League, where he is also General Secretary. He is on far too many committees, reflecting a wide range of interests.

Sylvia Kölling

Sylvia Kölling is a researcher with links to the SpLeisH team at MMU Cheshire and her research interests include local and regional municipal history of Great Manchester, the history of sanitary reform in Britain and Victorian Britain. Sylvia’s current research concerns the history of baths and wash-houses in Manchester.

Tosh Warwick

Dr Tosh Warwick joined Manchester Metropolitan University in January 2019 as Research Associate (Impact) in the History Research Centre. Tosh was previously Research Associate in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow, lectured at Huddersfield, Leeds Beckett and Teesside Universities and has held a number of roles in the heritage sector including as Heritage Development Officer at Middlesbrough Council where he contributed to a number of major Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) supported regeneration projects. He is the founder of Heritage Unlocked (hyperlink www.heritageunlocked.com) consultancy which works with history and Heritage projects across community, corporate and local authority sectors. Contact Tosh on t.warwick@mmu.ac.uk

Vicki Valosik

Vicki Valosik is a writer based in Washington, DC. She is working on a book on the development of synchronized swimming, a sport with a much deeper story than meets the eye. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, US News & World Report, Huffington Post, Washington Post Magazine, and American Scholar, among others. You can find her at vickivalosik.com and on Twitter @VValosik

Walter Tempelman

Walter Tempelman is a Dutch freelance journalist. He is a director at the national radio in the Netherlands, the NOS. On Radio 1, the network for news and sports, at the long-running sports radioshows Langs de Lijn en Langs de Lijn En Omstreken. Besides his work and love for the radio, he also hosts the site Discover the Games. A site dedicated to obscure, small multi-sport events and lesser-known sports all over the world. He reports from those events for several media and writes historical pieces about the obscure events in the past: The Games that once were. www.discoverthegames.com Twitter: @discoverthegame Instagram: DiscovertheGames

Wim Zonneveld

Wim Zonneveld (1950), an emeritus Utrecht University reader in language acquisition and English language and culture, recently started investigating early Dutch sports history. He has published in Dutch journals such as Het Rijwiel and Oud Utrecht on cycling and De Vriendenband on athletics, and  (with Henk Mees) in The Journal of Olympic History. In 2017 he published a biography of 19th c. Dutch ace speed skater Klaas Pander. Together, Luitzen and Zonneveld published (2017) on ‘the visual turn’, presenting studies of end of 19th c. sports photography, in De Moderne Tijd and Ex Tempore; and on the topic presented here. They are also editors of theDeSportwereld magazine for Dutch sports history. www.desportwereld.nl 
wimzonneveld@ziggo.nl

Wray Vamplew

Currently Wray is a Visiting Research Professor attached to the SpLeisH research group at MMU Cheshire and the General Editor for the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Sport as well as the Special Projects Editor for the International Journal of the History of Sport. Among his previous posts are Professor of Sport History at the University of Stirling.and Director of the International Centre of Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. Wray's specialist interests are the quantitative and economic History of Sport.

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