Football next to a red football helmet with the number 8 on the side
Lectures, Readings, Colloquia

Iowa Colloquium on Sport and Culture presents "The Football Helmet: A Cultural History of an American Icon" with Noah Cohan

What is the football helmet? More than perhaps any other object in American sports, the football helmet is densely packed with contested meaning. It is the symbolic focal point for the fascination and love of millions of American sports fans, even as it has emerged as the site of trauma so great, it threatens to destroy the sport itself.

 

The talk will be delivered on Zoom and is free and open to the public.

Please register in advance for this webinar at the link below:

https://uiowa.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bQNJF86ARtWNuCxgHve2nQ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

 

Noah Cohan is Assistant Director of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research and teaching are oriented to the intersection of American sports, fan cultures, and narratives, particularly as they pertain to race and gender. Cohan’s book, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sports, was published in 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press. He is the founding coordinator of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, co-convener of the AMCS program initiative in Sports and Society: Culture, Power, and Identity, and co-creator of Whereas Hoops, a multimedia work of scholarship and activism aimed at getting basketball hoops installed in St. Louis’s Forest Park.