Claremont, Calif. (March 25, 2014) — Pitzer College presents “Brazil 2014: The First Post-Nationalist World Cup?,” a talk by Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper, on Tuesday, April 8 at 9:40 a.m. in Pitzer’s George C.S. Benson Auditorium. “Brazil 2014” is the second lecture in a series of events at Pitzer College about the World Cup. This talk is free and open to the public.
Simon Kuper
World Cup frequently evokes outbursts of nationalistic fervor. As historian Eric Hobsbawm said, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.” In this talk, Kuper argues that globalization and cosmopolitanism have undermined the World Cup’s capacity to be a vehicle for nationalist sentiment, and Brazil 2014 may be the first post-nationalist, cosmopolitan World Cup.
Kuper Financial Times’ column covers a wide range of topics, including sports, politics and the vagaries of modern life. Based in Paris, Kuper is the author of several books: Football Against the Enemy, which won the William Hill prize for Sports Book of the Year; Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Football in Europe During the Second World War; and, as co-author with Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics. In 2008, he won the Manuel Vazquez Montalban prize for sports writing. In 2011, he was named Britain’s Cultural Commentator of the Year in Editorial Intelligence’s Comment Awards. Born in Uganda, Kuper studied at Oxford University and Harvard University.
The third and final lecture in this series on the World Cup will be “A World without a World Cup: An Abolitionist Perspective” by UC Riverside Professor Jennifer Doyle on April 17. The World Cup events at Pitzer are sponsored by a Brazil/Latin American Studies Mellon Grant and the Institute for Global/Local Action & Study at Pitzer College.
