Profile
Frank Andre Guridy is Professor of History and African American & African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. Set in Texas in the 1960s and 70s, his latest book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how American sporting culture was transformed by the Civil Rights and the Second-Wave feminist movements and the deepening commercialization of professional and intercollegiate sports. Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and in the Caribbean. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. His scholarly articles have appeared in Kalfou, Radical History Review, Caribbean Studies, Social Text, and Cuban Studies.
Guridy’s writing and commentary on sport, society, and politics have been published in Public Books, Columbia News, NBC News.com and the Washington Post. He has also appeared on a wide variety of podcasts, radio, and TV programs, including the Edge of Sports podcast by The Nation, Burn it All Down, End of Sport, Texas Public Radio, the Houston Chronicle’s Sports Nation, Al Jazeera’s “The Listening Post,” WNYC Public Radio, among others. His fellowships and awards include the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library. He is also an award-winning teacher, receiving the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019. His current book project, Between Conflict and Community: The Stadium in American Life, under contract with Basic Books, is a history of the American stadium as a community institution that has been a battleground for social justice since its inception.