Samuel M. Clevenger, Ph.D.

Samuel M. Clevenger joined the Sport Management faculty in Towson University’s Department of Kinesiology in 2018.  Prior to arriving at Towson, he previously taught at the University of Maryland.  His teaching interests include the history and socio-cultural study of sport, sport and media studies, sport and the environment, and issues of race, gender, and nationalism within sport.  He supports the study of historical topics related to sport and the sporting industry, and works to highlight the importance and practical applicability of historical analysis through his teaching and scholarship.  Dr. Clevenger has previously conducted research on discourses of militarization and agricultural labor within the history of physically active university pedagogy, as well as the role of postcolonial theories within the sport history field.  His current research focuses on the centrality of sporting and discourses of health in the planning of early twentieth-century utopian and model communities.

Select Publications

• Posbergh, A., and S. M. Clevenger (2022). Beyond Caster as object? Examining media constructions of Caster Semenya through decolonial thinking. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health. DOI: 10.1080/2159676X.2022.2086164
• Clevenger, S. M., and D. L. Andrews (2021). Regenerating the ‘Stock’ of the Empire: Biopower and Physical Culture in English Garden City Planning Discourse, 1898-1903. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 38(2-3), 282-301. DOI: 10.1080/09523367.2021.1891531
• Clevenger, S. M., O. Rick., and J. Bustad. (2020). Critiquing Anthropocentric Media Coverage of the COVID-19 Sport ‘Hiatus’. International Journal of Sport Communication, 13(3), 559-565. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1123/ijsc.2020-0239
• Clevenger, S. M. (2020). Transtemporal sport histories; Or, rethinking the ‘invention’ of American basketball. Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics, 23(5), 959-974. DOI: 10.1080/17430437.2019.1597855
• Clevenger, S. M. (2017). Sport history, modernity and the logic of coloniality: A case for decoloniality. Rethinking History, 21(4), 586-605. DOI: 10.1080/13642529.2017.1326696

Research

• Sport History
• Race, Gender, and Sports Media
• Sport, Health and the Built Environment

Courses Taught 

• KNES 441 The American Women in Sport 
• KNES 345 Seminar & Field Experience in Sport Management 
• KNES 353 Sport & Society