Joseph Darda

Joseph Darda is a professor of English at Michigan State University and a historian of American culture, sports, and racial formation.

He is the author of four books, including, most recently, Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which investigates how the sports industry has incubated ideas about race, gender, and advantage since the civil rights era.

His previous books include The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), and Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019). CHOICE named How White Men Won the Culture Wars an Outstanding Academic Title for 2022, and the New Republic called it “original and persuasive” and “a wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene.”

Darda is currently developing a group biography tentatively titled “Athletic Revolutionaries: Jack Scott and the Jocks Who Brought the Left to the Locker Room.” He is also editing a volume on running culture in the United States titled “Distance: On Running, and Not Running, in America,” which is under advanced contract with the University of Washington Press.

He has published articles in American Literary History, American Literature, American Quarterly, and Critical Inquiry, among other journals, and contributed essays to the Los Angeles Review of Books. With the historian Amira Rose Davis, he coedited a 2023 special issue of American Quarterly titled “The Body Issue: Sports and the Politics of Embodiment.” He has since joined the journal’s Board of Managing Editors.

He has held year-long fellowships at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute and the University of California, Irvine.

At MSU, Darda coordinated the 2024–25 speaker series Literary Studies Now, which brought leading literary scholars to campus to address the state of the discipline and share how they’re practice it now. This year, he is coordinating the University Studies Now series, which invites scholars and journalists to present their research on the history, politics, and culture of American higher education, from the expropriation of Indigenous land to the rise of edtech.

He lives in East Lansing with his partner, Samantha Gailey, a scholar of environmental health, and their daughter, Lou.