Joseph Darda

Joseph Darda is a professor of English at Michigan State University and a historian of American literature, culture, sports, and racial formation. His current research investigates the political Left’s ambivalence toward sports and recreation across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

He recently completed a group biography titled Radical Jocks: A Locker-Room Revolution in Nixon’s America (University of North Carolina Press), which revisits the early 1970s movement known as the athletic revolution. Radical Jocks tells the intersecting stories of Harry Edwards, Lynda Huey, Dave Meggyesy, Jack and Micki Scott, Tommie Smith, Bill Walton, and other athletes and activists who brought the ideals of the New Left to some of the most conservative American institutions: university athletic departments, the US Olympic Committee, and the National Football League. The athletic revolutionaries championed mass participation and pleasure over spectacle and profit and advocated for athletes to govern their own leagues and associations. For a tumultuous half-decade, they were impossible to ignore. They took over a prestigious liberal arts college’s athletic department. They were featured on network news programs and in Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated, and Time. The vice president of the United States condemned them. Radical Jocks returns to a time when athletes could be radicals and the Left could envision a future in which sports would be something more than big business.

Darda is currently developing a short history of Left sports movements in the United States titled Left Field: Sports and the Radical Politics of Play (University of California Press). From the workers’ sports movement of the 1920s and ’30s to the queer and crip sports movements of the late twentieth century to Zohran Mamdani’s mobilization of sports fandom, Left Field chronicles how generations of American organizers and outsiders have used sports to imagine alternative relations to work, the body, and the idea of the good life. Darda recounts how a succession of movements imagined sports not as labor but as a form of dissent against it, a subtle rebellion against the morality of work and the norm of the productive body. Left Field will be published with the University of California Press’s American Studies Now series, which is dedicated to short, timely, accessible books at the intersection of culture and politics.

He is also editing a volume titled Distance: On Running, and Not Running, in America (University of Washington Press), which brings together leading sports scholars and journalists to investigate the contradictions of one of America’s most popular forms of exercise and least popular sports. Running is accessible and exclusive, pleasurable and punishing, practiced by millions and followed by few, identified with a “high” as well as with sheer, utter boredom. Through stories about trail running and competing claims over land use in the Colorado mountains, Nike’s sometimes outlandish attempts to engineer professional running success, and where the Boston Marathon course doesn’t go, Distance asks why we run, and why most of us don’t.

Darda is the author of four previous books investigating how forms of human difference that may seem stable and old continue to change in our time and how culture––literature, art, film and television, athletic competition––registers and often prefigures that change. Since World War II, state and nonstate actors have, he shows, made new racial categories and redrawn racial lines by defining who may act in self-defense, who may claim the entitled status of veteran, who must wait on freedom and for how long, and who owes what and whom for athletic success. His past books include Empire of Defense: Race and the Cultural Politics of Permanent War (University of Chicago Press, 2019), How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (University of California Press, 2021), The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism (Stanford University Press, 2022), and Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt (Cambridge University Press, 2025). 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.”

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 now serves on the Board of Managing Editors for American Quarterly and coedits, with Courtney Cox and Frank Andre Guridy, the new NYU Press book series Athletic Revolutions.

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 practicing it now. In 2025–26, he organized the University Studies Now series, which invited 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. His recent undergraduate courses include English 445: “Culture as Competition,” English 323/Journalism 492: “Joan Didion and the New Journalism,” English 320B: “The Campus Novel,” English 320D: “Literary Institutions,” English 210: “The Sports Cliché,” English 210: “The Literary Prize,” and IAH 207: “The Sporting Public.” His recent graduate seminars include English 826: “Critical University Studies” and English 818: “The Public Humanities.”

Darda’s own athletic background informs his interest in the politics of sports. He competed in track and field for the University of Washington from 2005 to 2009 and has raced more than fifty marathons since.

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