The Sport Literature Association (SLA), headquartered at East Tennessee State University, is a global organization dedicated to the study of sport in literature and culture. With a membership numbering many hundred students, students, and readers from round the world, SLA sponsors an annual conference in a very completely different North yank location every summer. Its twenty eighth such conference was held at the University of Maine, Orono and June 22–25, 2011. SLA is an affiliate of the yank Literature Association, and therefore the publications of SLA members are indexed by the trendy Language Association, yank Humanities Index, Gale, and EBSCO Publishing. The president of the organization for 2011-12 is Dennis Gildea of Springfield school.
SLA was organized in 1983 at San Diego State University, by Lyle Olsen, a physical education professor and former minor league baseball player and school baseball coach; Alfred F. Boe, an English and comparative literature professor; and variety of their colleagues. The stated purpose of the organization was “to encourage, stimulate, and foster the alliance of sport with the humanities”.
The organization’s initial president was Ralph M. Grawunder, another physical education professor at SDSU. different people crucially concerned within the early development of the organization were Richard W. Wells, Virginia L. Evans, and Susan Bandy of San Diego State University; Thomas F. Scanlon of University of California, Riverside; Eric Solomon of San Francisco State University; Michael Oriard of Oregon State University; Elizabeth S. Bressan of the University of Oregon; Richard Keller of Emporia State University; Mary McElroy of Kansas State University; Richard Doxtator of the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point; Robert J. Higgs and Donald Johnson of East Tennessee State University; David Vanderwerken of Texas Christian University Richard C. Crepeau of the University of Central Florida; and Christian L. Messenger of University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.
The SLA’s initial annual conference met at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, July 26–28, 1984. The program chair was Susan Bandy. additionally to fifteen sessions of papers and panels, that conference featured special lectures in honor of 3 people who are leading figures within the space of sports literature: Mark Harris, author of Bang the Drum Slowly and different highly acclaimed baseball novels; Eleanor Metheny, influential physical educator and author who championed women’s equality in sports; and Robert J. Higgs, author of Laurel & Thorn: The Athlete in yank Literature, one amongst the pioneering studies in sport literature, and co-editor of The Sporting Spirit a well-liked sports literature anthology. Higgs, who would become one amongst the foremost distinguished and influential members of SLA, was additional honored by the organization with a publication of a festschrift, One for the Higger: Jack Higgs, a person for All Seasons, in 1994; and he was presented the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008.
The inaugural issue of the organization’s journal, Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature, with Lyle Olsen as founding editor and Alfred Boe as associate editor, was the autumn 1983 variety. Section editors of that initial issue included: Boe, Scanlon , Bandy, Bruce Weigl of recent Dominion University, Fred S. Moramarco of San Diego State University , Tim Wulfemeyer of the University of Hawaii at Manoa , Walter Harrison of Colorado school, Laurel Dean of University of California, San Diego, and James C. Hinkle of San Diego State University. The editorial board consisted of Boe, Dean, Grawunder, Hinkle, Moramarco, and Oriard. Robert Hamblin of Southeast Missouri State University became poetry editor with the second issue of the journal in spring 1984 and continued in that capability till 2005.
The journal’s name was modified to Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature in 1988, and therefore the following year the publication offices for the journal moved to East Tennessee State University when Olsen joined the school there, where he continued to supply leadership for SLA and Aethlon till his death in 2000. Don Johnson, professor of English at East Tennessee State University, served because the general editor of Aethlon from 1988 till 2005; Joyce Duncan, a lecturer at ETSU, is that the current editor, having assumed the position with the autumn 2005 issue. Duncan has conjointly served as managing editor of SLA since 1993. |
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