From the Rutgers University Press website:
As one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s Leonard-Cushing Fight to The Joe Louis Story, Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
About Travis Vogan
Associate Professor Travis Vogan has a joint faculty appointment in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of these books:
- The Boxing Film: A Cultural and Transmedia History (Rutgers University Press)
- Sporting Realities: Critical Readings of the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press). Co-edited with Samantha N. Sheppard
- ABC Sports: The Rise and Fall of Network Sports Television (University of California Press)
- ESPN: The Making of the Sports Media Empire (University of Illinois Press)
- Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media (University of Illinois Press)
He has published articles in American Art, Film History, Convergence, Television & New Media, Popular Communication, Communication & Sport, Journal of Sport History, The Moving Image, and various other journals and anthologies. In addition, he has served as a contributor to and source for media outlets that include the New York Times, NPR’s Marketplace, The Guardian, Washington Post, Wired, HuffPost, The Athletic, and Deadspin. He is associate editor of the Journal of Sport History and co-editor of the University of Illinois Press book series Studies in Sports Media.