On April 21, 2022, the Third Space Speaker Series will feature Scott N. Brooks and Nicholas Villanueva, two extraordinary scholars who will give brief presentations on their work and engage in a dialogue with the Whitman community about sports, identity and society.
Brooks, an associate professor with the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University (ASU), also serves as the director of ASU’s Global Sport Institute (featured in the video above). He is the author of "Black Men Can’t Shoot" (University of Chicago, 2009), and his work has been published in academic journals, edited volumes and textbooks. Additionally, Brooks has been a consultant with the NFL and MLB, and has advised numerous college and high school coaches and athletes. Brooks has been affiliated with the Wharton Sports Business Initiative and Yale’s Urban Ethnography Project. He earned his bachelor's from University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Villanueva is the director of critical sports studies and assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. A first-generation college student, he earned his Ph.D. in history with a concentration in race and ethnicity in 20th century United States from Vanderbilt University. In addition to his work in critical sports studies, Villanueva has an affiliation with the Center for the American West and Latin American Studies at UC Boulder. His award-winning book, “The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands” (University of New Mexico Press, 2017), examines the increase in Mexican lynching during the first 10 years of the Mexican Revolution. Villanueva’s latest publication, "The Athlete as National Symbol: Critical Essays on Sports in the International Arena" (McFarland, 2020) explores the phenomenon of nationalism through the microcosm of sport. Villanueva has also presented on the often-overlooked history of LGBTQ participation in the sport of rodeo.
