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!
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 Literatures and African and African American Studies, Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He specializes in urban life and how cities change. He is the author of The Invention of the Future: A History of Cities in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, forthcoming in January 2026).The book opens in the 1750s, when city dwellers and planners began to assume that the future would be radically different from the past. It recasts modern urbanization within a history of competing visions, amid dramatic technological, intellectual, and cultural transformations. The book argues that the futures of the past can help us better understand the history of built environments, as well as our own crossroads in an increasingly urban world.
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 joined The Athletic as a deputy editor in the summer of 2025. He has written for the the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Telegraph, and spent four years as football correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph. Before joining the Athletic he spent 10 years teaching at Harvard.
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.
LOCATION:Sever Hall, Room 113 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20261109T230000Z DTEND:20261110T045859Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR