The Beautiful Game: Soccer, City, Nation, World

Speakers: Garnette Cadogan, Bruno Carvalho, and Duncan White
Moderator: Louisa Thomas

About the Event

The 2026 World Cup vividly reminded us of how “the beautiful game” can affect the world at every scale, from sports-bar bonding to the jostling of nations. This event brings together local experts and fans to help us reflect on the World Cup and the significance of the world’s most popular sport. Please join us!

About the Speakers

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist whose research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. Named by the literary magazine Freeman's as one of 29 writers from around the world who "represent the future of new writing” in 2017, he writes about culture and the arts for various publications. Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at MIT. He was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar (2017-2018) at DUSP, and is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. The editor-at-large of Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (co-edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro), he is at work on a book on walking.

Bruno Carvalho is Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature, Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Chair of the Standing Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, and Interim Chair of Ethnicity, Migration, Rights. He specializes in urban life and how cities change. His latest book is The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2026). Carvalho is also the author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, co-edits a book series on the built environment called Lateral Exchanges, and has published several essays bridging history, literature, culture, urban design, and landscape architecture, on topics including soccer. He is teaching a seminar called “Soccer, Globalization, and Urban Life,” and plans to write a book called Soccer and the City: A History.

Louisa Thomas is a staff writer for the New Yorker. She is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, a biography of the former First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams (1775-1852), and Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, about her great-grandfather, Norman Thomas, and his three brothers. She is also the coauthor, with John Urschel, of Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, and the co-editor, with Mary Pilon, of Losers: Dispatches from the Other Side of the Scoreboard. A former writer and editor for ESPN's Grantland, her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York, Vogue, Racquet, several Best American Sports Writing anthologies, and other places. An avid runner, chess enthusiast, and tennis player, she lives outside of Boston with her husband and two small children.

Duncan White is the Director of Strategy and Plans for the Arts & Humanities division at Harvard. He has previously been the Associate Director of the General Education Program and taught for 10 years in History & Literature, where he also served as Associate Director. He convenes the Mahindra Humanities Center's Writers Speak Series.

Before arriving at Harvard he had a career as a sports reporter. Having started out as a copy editor and writer for various websites, magazines and newspapers, Duncan was appointed Football Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph in 2008 a position he held for four years before moving into higher education. He has reported on the Premier League, the Champions League and on three World Cups, as well as the 2012 London Olympics. His work took him to over 40 countries, countless games and he has interviewed some of the sporting greats, including David Beckham, Michael Phelps and Zlatan Ibrahimovic. 

In 2025 he left Harvard to join the Athletic's London office as a Senior Managing Editor of their soccer coverage. After eight months in the UK he moved back to the Boston area to help run coverage of the World Cup last summer. He is trapped in an unhappy relationship with Sheffield Wednesday.  

About the Series: Sports & Us

The recent World Cup gave us a vivid reminder that sports are engines of national and regional pride, political maneuvering, human drama, ardent engagement, and economic consequence. Events in the Sports & Us series will explore the many dimensions of athletic competition and how they have contributed to the making of our world.