Ed Smith is launching a new MA in Sports History Smith, now a successful journalist and broadcaster, has been a non-teaching fellow at the University of Buckingham for the last five years but he will now take up a teaching role as course director of the Sports History course which will start in October. Smith has recruited a stellar cast of guest lecturers with Mike Brearley, the Ashes-winning former England cricket captain, Rugby World Cup-winning coach Sir Clive Woodward, former Governor of the Bank of England, Lord King of Lothbury, and leading sports academics Professor Richard Holt and Professor Tony Collins among those who will speak at the Caledonian Club in London’s Belgravia between October and March. ” One of the most fun parts of setting the course up was that I had a blank piece of paper so I could say: Which ten people would I like to hear on the history and development of sport?” Smith said. ” I’d want to listen to Professor Richard Holt and Professor Tony Collins who are leading scholars of 19th and 20th century sport, but I’d also want to hear from people who have a real insight into how sport has changed and will change so I went to Mike Brearley, Clive Woodward and Lord King of Lothbury and, to my delight, they all said ‘yes’ and they are all totally on board. ” We have some leading journalists and authors. Simon Kuper from the Financial Times, who I think is a brilliant writer on football and ideas, has also agreed to speak. ” There is an international dimension. One thing we were keen to do was to appeal to people who wanted to study not only English sport but international sport so we have got one of the country’s leading Germanists, Professor Christopher Young from the University of Cambridge, who has written a book on the 1972 Munich Olympics. ” He’s the academic adviser and is part of the lecturing team along with Simon Martin, the course co-director, who brings a very strong European expertise As a leading scholar of Italian sport. ” I have a knowledge of American sport because of my first book was about cricket and baseball. So the course is both trans-Atlantic and continental in its range of speakers and expertise.” The MA course will be part-time but will include one substantial piece of academic work, a 20,000 word dissertation. Smith believes that course could be completed by current professional cricketers but there is also the option of joining as an associate student for those concerned about completing the academic research. ” The guideline is to have a first degree with a 2:1 or better. In practice if they were outstanding candidates who have developed skills in the workplace then the application process would definitely take that into account as well,” he said. ” It’s a part time course so it could easily appeal to professional cricketers. The nature of a professional cricketer’s life is such that you do have gaps and down-time but there is definitely a lot of self-discipline required. ” It’s not difficult to attend the ten evening events in central London or to arrange a couple of supervision meetings each term with me or other members of the academic team. Those can be done face-to-face or on Skype. ” The biggest question is about the discipline of doing that long dissertation. If anyone has any questions about it we can definitely talk it through. ” There are two ways of doing the course. To get the qualification of an MA you have do the 20,000 word dissertation. Alternatively you can be part of the intellectual community and come to the events and have access to all that firepower as an associate student. That is half as expensive, you don’t do the dissertation but you don’t get the MA.” {{ak_sharing}}
