Draft:Robert Edelman

Robert Edelman
Born	1945 (age 78–79)
Nationality	American
Occupation	Historian
Employer	University of California, San Diego
Known for	Expertise in the history of Soviet sports

Robert Edelman (born 1945) is an American historian. Since 1972, he has been a Professor of Russian History and Sports History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sports History and is recognized as one of the leading international experts on the history of Soviet sports.

Life

Robert Edelman was born in 1945 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a short walk from Ebbets Field. Watching the fabled Boys of Summer was his first sporting experience. The Dodgers’ 1957 exit from Brooklyn was his first confrontation with the true nature of modern sport not to mention capitalism. He too left Brooklyn for college, graduating from Princeton University in 1966 and later receiving a Ph.D. in Russian history from Columbia University in 1974, after which he began teaching in the history department of the University of California, San Diego where he is presently a professor of Russian history and the history of sport. He has also taught at UCLA.

After publishing two books on pre-revolutionary Russian history, Edelman turned his attention to the study of Soviet sport, producing a volume, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, (Oxford UP, 1993). That book won the annual awards of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles and the North American Society of Sports Historians. He has just published Spartak Moscow: A History of the People’s Team in the Workers’ State (Cornell UP) which won the Zelnik Prize of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies for the best work of history in the field as well as the annual prize of the North American Society of Sports Historians for the second time. He has also published articles in the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, Russian Review, the Journal of Sports History, Hoop, History Today and the American Historical Review. He has received Guggenheim, NEH, Woodrow Wilson, Fulbright, and IREX fellowships. He is presently editing The Oxford Handbook of Sports History and is directing a multi-year project on sport in the Cold War for the Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Edelman has worked as a stringer for the Associated Press covering the National Basketball Association. His reporting and commentary have appeared in the New York Times and on Public Radio International’s daily business show, Marketplace. He has worked with, and in some cases appeared on documentaries by ESPN, HBO, ABC, PBS, and the BBC about Russian and Soviet sport. He also served as a researcher for CBS at the 1998 Olympic Winter Games. In the late eighties, Edelman served as an adviser to several NBA clubs seeking talent from the former Soviet Union. He has been a frequent visitor to Russia and its arenas since 1965. At the moment, he is West Coast NBA correspondent for the Russian national sports daily, Sport-Express. He lives in Solana Beach, California with three children, two dogs, and one wife. His sports fantasy is to have lived in Weimar Germany and been a soccer coach at the Frankfurt School.

Publications

Robert Edelman's significant contributions to historical scholarship include a range of books, edited volumes, and articles. Below is a selection of his work:

• Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1905-1917, Rutgers University Press, 1980.
• Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia's Southwest, Cornell University Press, 1987.
• Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, Oxford University Press, 1993.

   ** Winner of the annual book awards of the Amateur Athletic Foundation of Los Angeles and the North American Society of Sports Historians.

• "A Small Way of Saying No: Spartak Soccer, Moscow Men and the Communist Party, 1900-1945", in American Historical Review, December 2002.
• Published articles in Russian Review, Slavic Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of Sports History, New York Times, History Today, and Hoop.
• Spartak Moscow, A History of the People's Team in the Worker's State, Cornell University Press, 2009.

   ** Annual book prize of the North American Society of Sport Historians.
   ** The Reginald Zelnik Prize, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, for the best monograph on Slavic, East European and Eurasian history.
   ** Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title.

• Co-editor, University of California Press book series on sport history.
• Co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Sports History, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
• Co-director of multi-year research project on "Sport in the Global Cold War," under the auspices of the Cold War International History Project.

External Links

• Robert Edelman's page at the University of California, San Diego
• Literature by and about Robert Edelman in the catalog of the German National Library