Daniel A. Nathan

Like my grandfather and father, I was born in Baltimore, Maryland and raised as an Orioles fan. Unlike them, however, I grew up in Flint, Michigan, of Roger & Me fame. I attended Allegheny College where I was a double History and English major, and spent part of my junior year studying in London.  I earned my M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. After teaching at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio for four years, I was the Fulbright Professor of North American Studies at the University of Tampere in Finland. My wife, Susan Taylor, and I had a wonderful year in Finland in large part because of the birth of our son Benjamin Erik Nathan. Our lives were further enriched with the birth of our daughter Zoë Elizabeth Nathan in October 2003.

I have eclectic, wide-ranging interests.  All of my courses and most of my writing projects are interdisciplinary and most engage the politics of cultural representation, popular culture, and history.  One of my primary areas of interest is American sport.  My book, Saying It's So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (University of Illinois Press, 2003), engages all of these subjects.  I have also written essays and book,film, and exhibition reviews for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, American Quarterly, American Studies, The International Journal of the History of Sport, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Sport History, the OAH Magazine of History, Sociology of Sport Journal, and The Encyclopedia of American Culture and Intellectual History.  In addition, I have collaborated with two former Skidmore students, Peter Berg and Erin Klemyk, to write an essay titled "'The Truth Wrapped in a Package of Lies': Hollywood, History, and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York" published in Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film (Texas A & M University Press, 2007).  I have also contributed chapters to Baseball in America and America in Baseball (Texas A & M University Press, 2008) and All-Stars and Movie Stars: Sports in Film and History (University Press of Kentucky, 2008).

My writing complements my teaching, as both stress interdisciplinarity and the multiple ways that we can know the past.  I have, for example, taught classes on the 1950s, how Hollywood filmmakers have represented the American past, popular culture as public history, E.L. Doctorow's America, and global perspectives of the United States.

A former member of the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH) Executive Council and Chair of the NASSH Book Award Committee, I have also served as the Film, Media, and Museum Reviews editor for the Journal of Sport History and am on several editorial boards.  Here at Skidmore, I have Chaired the Committee on Educational Policies and Planning and the Athletic Council.