Patricia Vertinsky

Dr. Vertinsky is regarded as perhaps the most influential thinker and producer in the fields relating to sports studies, cultural studies and the body/society paradigm. She is a social and cultural historian whose research is located at the centre of an upsurge of interdisciplinary interest in the body and its role in society, which is now seen as central to much contemporary thought and practice in medical science, educational practice, feminism, technology and health. It is a subject that bridges the sciences, the humanities and the social sciences and professions.

Dr. Vertinsky came to The University of British Columbia (UBC) as Assistant Professor in 1975. Her co-edited collections, Sites of Sport: Space and Place and Experience and Disciplining Bodies in the Gymnasium: Memory, Monument and Modernism, appeared in the spring of 2004. She has many publications, honours and awards, including election as a Fellow of the American Academy of Kinesiology and Physical Education and to the College of Fellows of the European Committee for Sport History. She is Past-President of the North American Society for Sport History and Vice-President of the International Society for the History of Sport. She is also a UBC Distinguished University Scholar.