Biography

As a historian interested in the socio-cultural study of sport and physical activity, I have two primary lines of research. The first of these includes examinations – primarily historical – of global sporting events as sites of resistance and protest. But my focus remains on the lived experience of sport participants, the desire to separate organizational rhetoric from local remains, and the integration of oral history with archival sources as a methodological approach.

Research areas

  • Canadian sport history
  • Sport, social justice, and sites of resistance and protest
  • Sport, social inequality, and international development
  • Sport, film, and society
  • The modern Olympics and global sporting events

Education

  • PhD, University of Toronto, Graduate Program in Exercise Sciences (2008)
    • Doctoral project: A Night at the Garden(s): A History of Professional Hockey Spectatorship in the 1920s and 1930s (supervisor: Dr. Bruce Kidd)
  • M.A., University of Toronto, Department of History (2000)
  • M.B.A., Queen’s University (1991)
  • B.A., Queen’s University (1989)

Publications

Monographs

Field, Russell. A Night at the Gardens: Hockey Spectators in New York and Toronto in the Interwar Years. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, submitted).

Darnell, Simon, Russell Field, and Bruce Kidd. The History of Politics of Sport-for-Development: Activists, Ideologues and Reformers. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, in preparation).

Edited Collections

Field, Russell, (Ed.). Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, in press).

Field, Russell and Bruce Kidd, (Eds.). 40 Years of Sport and Social Change, 1968-2008: “To Remember is to Resist.” (New York and London: Routledge, 2011).

Special Issue/Edited Collection

MacLean, Malcolm, and Russell Field. (Eds.) “Sport beyond the nation state,” National Identities, 16 (4), 2014.

Popovic, Megan, and Russell Field. (Eds.) “Autobiography and Autoethnography in Sport History,” Sport History Review, 44 (1), 2013.

Kidd, Bruce and Russell Field, (Eds.). “‘To Remember is to Resist:’ 40 Years of Sport and Social Change, 1968-2008.” Sport in Society, 13(1) January 2010.

Kidd, Bruce and Russell Field, (Eds.). ‘To Remember is to Resist:’ 40 Years of Sport and Social Change, 1968-2008. New York and London: Routledge, 2011.

Articles

Field, Russell, and Bruce Kidd. “Canada and the Pan American Games,” International Journal of the History of Sport, 2015, invited submission, in preparation.
   
Field, Russell. “Remembering the Remembering,” Sport History Review, 46 (1), 2015, pp. 184-6.

Field, Russell. “Chasing My Grandfather’s Shadow: The Transformation of Geza Feldman and the Role of Physical Activity in the Life of George Field” [selected for and reprinted in a special Best of Sport History Review issue], Sport History Review, 46 (1), 2015, pp. 187-210.

Field, Russell, “Toques and turbans, sticks and show tunes: Incorporating the “other” within Canadian hockey films.” Amodern, No. 3: Sport and Visual Culture, 2014, http://amodern.net/article/toques-and-turbans/.

Field, Russell, “For Kick and Country: The 2010 VIVA World Cup and sport as a site for expressions of alternate ‘national’ identities.” National Identities, 16 (4), 2014, pp. 377-93.

MacLean, Malcolm, and Russell Field. “Performing nations, disrupting states: Sporting identities in nations without states,” National Identities, 16 (4), 2014, pp. 283-90.

Field, Russell, “The Public Sportscaster: Docudrama, national memory, sport history.” Journal of Sport History, 41 (2), 2014, pp. 241-50.

Field, Russell. “Re-entering the Sporting World: China's Sponsorship of the 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 31 (15), 2014, pp. 1852-67.

Field, Russell, “Representing ‘The Rocket:’ The Filmic Use of Maurice Richard in Canadian history.” Journal of Sport History, 41 (1), 2014, pp. 15-28.

Field, Russell, “The Struggle for Canadian Sport [The Test of Time].” Journal of Sport History, 41 (1), 2014, pp. 129-40.

Field, Russell. “Chasing My Grandfather’s Shadow: The Transformation of Geza Feldman and the Role of Physical Activity in the Life of George Field.” Sport History Review, 44 (1), 2013, pp. 53-76.

Field, Russell, “‘How we think about hockey, and ourselves’: Television, the 1972 Summit Series, and the construction of a pan-Canadian identity.” Canadian Issues/Thèmes canadiens, Winter 2012, pp. 40-45.

Field, Russell. "'To Remember is to Resist:' An Introduction." Sport in Society, 13(1), January 2010; pp. 6-11.

Field, Russell. “Constructing the Preferred Spectator: Arena Design and Operation and the Consumption of Hockey in 1930s Toronto.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 25 (6), May 2008, pp. 649-677.

Field, Russell. “Manufacturing memories and directing dreams: Commemoration, community, and the closing of Maple Leaf Gardens.” International Journal of Canadian Studies, 35, 2007, pp. 61-93.

Field, Russell. “The Ties That Bind: A 2003 Case Study of Toronto’s Sport Elite and the Operation of Commercial Sport.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 41 (1), 2006, pp. 29-58.

Field, Russell. “Passive Participation: The Selling of Spectacle and the Construction of Maple Leaf Gardens, 1931.” Sport History Review, 33(1), May 2002, pp. 35-50.

Book Chapters

Field, Russell. “Splitting the World of International Sport: The 1963 Games of the New Emerging Forces and the politics of challenging the global sport order.” In Dart, Jon, and Stephen Wagg, (Eds.). Sport, Protest and Globalisation: Stopping Play (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, submitted).

Field, Russell. “For Jets and Country: A month-long reminder of how sport matters” [Introduction]. In Field, Russell, (Ed.). Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, in press).

Field, Russell. “The New ‘Culture Wars’: The Vancouver 2010 Olympics, Public Protest, and the Politics of Resistance.” In Field, Russell, (Ed.). Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015, in press).

Field, Russell. “Sport and the Canadian Immigrant: Physical Expressions of Cultural Identity within a Dominant Culture, 1896-1945.” In Janelle Joseph, Simon Darnell, and Yuka Nakamura, (Eds.).  Race and Sport in Canada: Intersecting Inequalities (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2012).

Field, Russell. “Stoic Observers or Fanatic Fans? Women Ice Hockey Spectators in 1930s North America.” In Kim Toffoletti and Peter Mewett, (Eds.). Sport and its Female Fans (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).

Field, Russell. “‘There’s more people here tonight than at a first night of the Metropolitan’: Professional Hockey Spectatorship in the 1920s in New York and Toronto”. In Andrew Holman. (Ed.). Canada’s Game? Critical Essays on Ice Hockey and Identity. (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).