I have developed an interest in the study of the cultures of sports from the eighteenth century to present day. While researchers have studied sports from a historical, sociological, and physiological point of view, we have never really thought through the place of sports in our cultures. In particular the contribution of literature to the understanding of sports has been largely ignored. It is partly to remedy this state of affairs that I started thinking about the relationship between literature and sports. I work in particular on the ways in which literary texts contribute to a definition and to the focus of sports. I have worked on sports such as cricket, football, running, tennis, etc. These inquiries into given sports have yielded publications in internationally peer-reviewed sports journals.

I have worked with a number of scholars interested in the relationship between literature and the arts. This has for instance taken the form of alternating conferences in Paris, Leeds (where John McLeod has been the partner in this enterprise) and Kolkata in India (with Supriya Chaudhuri and Abhijit Gupta). A couple of publications have emerged from such work, in particular a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport, which I co-edited (first editor), and a special issue of Moving Worlds, co-edited by John McLeod and Shirley Chew. A conference, co-organised in 2022, by myself and by Caroline Bertonèche (University of Grenoble), dealt with « Sports and Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century » and is now being turned into an edited volume.

Because I share a special interest in the eighteenth century and in sports with Daniel O’Quinn (University of Guelph, Canada), we put in a successful bid on the cultures of sport in the early modern period. This programme was funded over the last two years by the France Canada Research Fund. We organised an international conference in Paris as well as panels at the 2014 Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the 2015 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This research is coming out in an edited volume, published in December 2017 by the University of Toronto Press.

Finally, with colleagues from the universities of Freiburg and of Sarren in Germany, and from the universities of Besançon, Limoges, and Rouen, we are developing a programme to study stadiums in Europe in the long twentieth century. Called « Arènes », this programme has been funded by the French ANR and the German DFG for a period of three years. This has enabled us, in particular, to appoint five doctoral students and one postdoc. The project website can be accessed here in German, and here in French.