NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. — This summer, The College of New Rochelle’s Dr. Amy Bass, Professor of History and Director of the SAS Honors Program, will once again attend the Olympics Summer Games in London, England. This will be Dr. Bass’s eighth Olympic Games as supervisor of NBC’s Olympic Research Room.
Dr. Bass will supervise a team of experts who provide background information and monitor breaking stories for the broadcast of the Games. According to Bass, “This team of 30 geopolitical specialists, sports experts, linguists, and journalists, knows the names of every person carrying a flag in the Opening Ceremony, what might happen in every event before it happens, and how to find out whatever anyone else doesn’t know. It is an amazing, tense, busy, scary place to work,” says Bass, “and about as high of a rush as you can get. I love it.”
Professor Bass, who has an international reputation for her interdisciplinary approach to the study of sports, has taught classes at CNR on subjects that include race and ethnicity, cultural theory, civil rights, (trans)nationalism, and modern culture.
She received her Ph.D. with distinction from Stony Brook University with a specialization in U.S. History and a comparative field in Cultural Studies, and is the author of Not the Triumph but the Struggle: the 1968 Olympic Games and the Making of the Black Athlete. She also edited In the Game: Race, Identity and Sports in the 20th Century. Her most recent book is Those About Him Remained Silent: The Memory and Memorial of W.E.B. Du Bois.
This coming fall semester Dr. Bass will teach an upper division history seminar entitled “Race, Sport, and Society,” as a way of encouraging students to understand how athletes are an excellent window through which to study ideas of racial and national identity.
