EVENT: Talk by Dr David Dee "Insiders, Outsiders and Ringsiders: Immigrants and Minorities in British Boxing" (February 1)

The Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations (University of Southampton) invites you to register for the latest seminar in our 2021/22 research seminar series, delivered by Dr David Dee (De Montfort University) and titled 'Insiders, Outsiders and Ringsiders: Immigrants and Minorities in British Boxing'.

Date: 1 February 2022
Time: 6-7:30PM GMT
Registration Link: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/parkes/news/seminars/2022/02/insiders-outsiders-and-ringsiders-immigrants-and-minorities-in-boxing.page

Event Details
Throughout its history, boxing - a sport with a worldwide appeal and profile – has been characterised by the significant involvement of ethnic minorities and immigrants. This is especially true in Britain, where illegal bare-knuckle prize-fighting was transformed and codified in the nineteenth century, with gloved boxing going on to become one of the country’s most important and popular sports thereafter.

Drawing from research for his Gerda Henkel Foundation-funded project, Dr Dee’s talk will explore British boxing’s ethnic history from the late eighteenth century, when London-born Sephardic Jew Daniel Mendoza became the Champion of England, through to recent times and the successes of Amir Khan, Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. It will demonstrate the considerable participation and interest in the sport amongst Jewish, Irish, Traveller, Italian, South-Asian and Black communities, amongst others, both inside and outside of the ring. However, it will also examine how and why boxing has impacted and influenced immigrant and minority identity, internal communal relations, the construction and deconstruction of ethnic and racial stereotypes and social, cultural, political and economic interactions between these groups/individuals and majority society.

About the Speaker
Dr David Dee, De Montfort University, is an Associate Professor/Reader of Modern History. He has researched and written widely on the modern History of the British-Jewish community and is the author of Sport and British Jewry: Integration, Ethnicity and Anti-Semitism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) and The ‘Estranged Generation’? Social and Generational Change in Interwar British Jewry (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He is currently working on a project, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, on the history of immigrants and minorities in British boxing.

Professor Tony Kushner, is the James Parkes Professor of the History of Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton and will chair this event.

Registration is free and all are welcome. Please click here to register.