The MIT Global France Seminar aims to bring together MIT faculty, instructors, and graduate students from across disciplines interested in the study of French and francophone cultures around the world. The seminar series is free and open to the public.
In this discussion, Laurent Dubois will present a chapter from his book ‘Soccer Empire’ and discuss some of the methodological and theoretical questions raised by using soccer as a way to think through the history of French empire, decolonization, and immigration. How does the study of sport — which remains relatively marginal in French Studies — allow us to re-think our approach to the categories of analysis and methods we use in understanding these topics?” Laurent Dubois, a specialist in the history and culture of France and the Caribbean, is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History at Duke University, and co-director of the Haiti laboratory of the Franklin Humanities Institute. He is the author of most recently, of Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press) and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (Metropolitan Books, 2012).