Profile
Frank Andre Guridy is the Dr. Kenneth and Kareitha Forde Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He is also Professor of History and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His most recent book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024) tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice from the 19th century until the present. The book has been reviewed in the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and featured on NPR on Fresh Air. His previous book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and 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.
His 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, NPR’s Fresh Air, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, 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 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 has also won awards for his teaching and service at multiple institutions, receiving the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia in 2019, and the Faculty Service Award at Columbia in 2023.
Books
The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play (Basic Books, 2024)
The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2021).
Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America (NYU Press, 2010)
Recent Publications
“Kelly Loeffler’s Sale of the Atlanta Dream shows the “Stick to Sports” Era is Over,”NBC
News, March 2, 2021
“Historic Protests Necessitate Historic Action by American Leaders,” Columbia News, June 5,
2020
“Counterhistories of the Sports Stadium,” Public Books, April 6, 2020.
“Currents in Afro-Latin American Political and Social Thought,” co-authored with Juliet Hooker in George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente, eds., Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 179-221.
“What’s Good for Boyle Heights has been Good at the Los Angeles Coliseum,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 4 (2017), 83-99.
“Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture,” by Benjamin Lisle. Sport in American History Blog, January 28, 2018
“The Patriarchal Journey of ‘The Juice’ in OJ: Made in America,” Journal of Sport History 44 (Fall 2017), 479-481.