Faculty Fellow Presentation: Adam Chill

How do sports use minority groups and how do minority groups use sports? Professor Adam Chill will discuss this question in the context of eighteenth and nineteenth-century bareknuckle boxing. Black, Irish, and Jewish boxers, patrons, and spectators played a major role in the development of the sport in Britain. While minority boxers were often exploited by the organizers of bareknuckle boxing, they also used the sport to defend their own manhood and the dignity of their communities and to demand a place in the British nation.