Author Archives: Laurent Dubois

About Laurent Dubois

I am Professor of Romance Studies and History and the Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University. I founded the Soccer Politics blog in 2009 as part of a course on "World Cup and World Politics" taught at Duke University. I'm currently teaching the course under the title "Soccer Politics" here at Duke. My books include Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (University of California Press, 2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (Basic Books, 2018)

The World Cup and the Dirty War

In 1978, Argentina hosted the World Cup in the midst of a period of tremendous political repression. Grant Farred’s book Long Distance Love tells this story, and reflects on what it means for the way we think about politics and football. More recently, this 2014 piece by Wright Thompson offers a remarkable account of the… Read More »

Temples of the Earthbound Gods

Christopher Gaffney’s book Temples of the Earthbound Gods offers us a rich geographical, culture, and ethnographic look at the way lives in Brazil and Argentina intersect with and our transformed by the space of stadia. What do you see as the most interesting contributions of this work? What kinds of theoretical approaches does he use… Read More »

African Soccerscapes

Peter Alegi’s book African Soccerscapes offers a careful account of the place of football in colonial Africa and the important role in played in the process of decolonization. Alegi, a Professor at Michigan State University, also maintains a blog called Football is Coming Home, and recently wrote about the first African Nations Cup. This post… Read More »

Philosophy and Soccer

A humorous reminder that there is something very strange about this game. Though, more recently, a series of philosophers have also shown that there are many ways to use soccer to think of what it is to be human.

Soccer Politics Class Begins

This week I began teaching “Soccer Politics” here at Duke University for the third time. This blog will host the writings of students in the course in four different languages: English, French, German and Spanish. You can see the class readings here. On the first day of class we analyzed three bits of the visual… Read More »

On the Ends of the World Cup

This was my concluding piece, part of a series I wrote for the New Republic “Goal Posts” blog, on the World Cup: “… This World Cup—however we have lived it—has just taught us once again what it always does. Though we watch from many locations, separated from one another by distance, we are brought together… Read More »

On Belgium

I wrote this analysis of the U.S. vs. Belgium match for The New Republic. An earlier analysis of the Belgian team, in comparison with the French team, is here.

Algeria’s Historic Victory

For the first time, Algeria moved on to the Round of 16 in the World Cup yesterday. As the game ended, a crowd hoisted a man in a wheelchair up above them to celebrate. Here is what the scene looked like from above in another plaza where a crowd waited out the final seconds of… Read More »