Illinois Wesleyan University


Illinois Wesleyan Professor's Essay Included in Baseball Anthology

BLOOMINGTON, Ill — Charles F. Springwood, associate professor of anthropology at Illinois Wesleyan University, is the author of an essay included in volume developed by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum as part of a major exhibition celebrating the sport.

Baseball As America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game, "investigates baseball's extraordinary relationship with American culture from its early roots to today." Published by National Geographic, the volume features articles a wide range of authors who range from television news anchor Tom Brokaw to best-selling novelist John Grisham to New Yorker writer Roger Angell.

Springwood's essay is entitled "The Mythopoetics of Place and Memory" and describes the importance that places have to America's pastime. From Cooperstown, N.Y., heralded as the birthplace of baseball, to Chicago's Wrigley Field to the baseball diamond built in Dyersville, Iowa, for the movie "Field of Dreams," Springwood maintains that "[b]aseball is animated by a unique relationship to space and time..."

Further, Springwood writes that "we all know that the game eludes the constraints of time, unfolding at its own pace, theoretically without end, given the possibility of extra innings. Space, too, is uniquely configured with each park and stadium enlivened by ts own, often idiosyncratic set of features and dimensions."

Baseball As America consists of 45 newly-commissioned and 30 classic essays, commentaries, and literature. The volume has been published in connection with an exhibition by the same name that opened in March at the American Museum of Natural History and will continue a nationwide tour through August 2005. The exhibition will be at The Field Museum in Chicago from February 7, 2003, to July 20, 2003.

Springwood's special areas of interest include semiotics, race, gender, visual culture, colonialism, ethnographic methods, sport, and alcohol usage. He has conducted research in Japan, Mexico, and the United States. The author or co-author of three books, most recently he published Beyond the Cheers: Race as Spectacle in College Sport (Suny Press).

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