Professor Charles Korr

International Centre for Sports History and Culture

Visiting Research Professor

Contact details
Telephone: (US) +1 314 3672688
Telephone:  (UK) 07981 759718
Email:  cpkorr@umsl.edu

Co-author of "More Than Just A Game", Chuck Korr is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of  Missouri – St. Louis (UMSL) and a Visiting Research Professor in the International Centre for Sport History and Culture at De Monfort University.

He was a professor at UMSL from 1970 to 2003 and since his retirement he continues to teach a graduate seminar in comparative history of sport. He has lectured in the FIFA MA program since its inception and since 2004, he has been a Visiting Professor in the autumn term in the Centre.

In 1969, he received his Ph.D. in seventeenth century English history and his first book dealt with foreign policy during that period. Since 1973, the focus of his research and teaching has been sport history, with emphasis on social, political, and economic issues. When he began to teach an undergraduate course, “Sport and Society” in 1974, it was one of the first comparative history of sport courses taught in a department of history at any  US  research university. He has lectured on sport history in more than fifteen countries on five continents.

He has twice been a visiting professor at the University of the  Western Cape in  Cape  Town ,  South Africa . He was an assistant to the Mayor of the City of St. Louis from 1977 to 1981, an adviser to the Cape Town 2004 Olympic Bid Committee and to the Robben Island Museum, and has been a consultant and on air participant in numerous television and radio broadcasts. In addition to his academic publications, his writing has appeared in newspapers including The Observer  and the  New York Sunday Times.

Books

• More Than Just a Game: Football v Apartheid, co-author with Marvin Close  (2008)
• The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players  Union , 1960 – 1980  (2002 and 2005). Winner of the Elysian Fields Quarterly award for the best book on baseball published in 2002.
• West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club  (1986 and 2005).
• Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy  (1976).

Film
 
He is the co-producer and research consultant for the South African produced feature length docu-drama, "More Than Just a Game" which tells the story of how, and why, South African political prisoners in Robben Island Prison created an organized set of sports leagues as way of continuing their struggle against apartheid and oppression. The film combines dramatic re-creations of events with extended interviews with former prisoners, each of whom served at least ten years on Robben Island.

Current Research Interests

• Labor relations in professional sports with special attention to comparisons between the  United States and the European Union.
• Politics of international sports.

Education

• BA and MA,  University of  California ,  Los Angeles  (UCLA) 1961, 1965.
• Ph.D.,  University  of  California ,  Los Angeles, 1969
• Institute of  Historical Research ,  University  of  London, 1966-67.