Amira Rose Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas-Austin where she specializes in 20th Century American History with an emphasis on race, gender, sports, and politics. Recently named a Mellon Emerging Faculty Leader by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, she finishing up her first book, “Can’t Eat a Medal”: The Lives and Labors of Black Women Athletes in the Age of Jim Crow (UNC Press). Her work has appeared in scholarly journals including the Radical History Review and the Journal of African American History as well as popular outlets such as The Washington Post and Slate. Davis also provides sports commentary for NPR, ESPN, and BBC and serves on the advisory board of the Jackie Robinson Museum and the Arthur Ashe Legacy Foundation. Davis, the co-host of the Feminist sports podcast, Burn it All Down and the host of Season 3 of American Prodigies.

Courtney M. Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon. Her research examines issues related to identity, technology, and labor through sport and wine. Her current book project, Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball, considers how Black women and non-binary athletes maneuver through the global sports-media complex. She is also co-director (with Dr. Perry B. Johnson) of The Sound of Victory, a multi-platform digital humanities project located at the intersection of music, sound, and sport. She previously worked for ESPN, Longhorn Network, NPR-affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks.

Jake W. Dean is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Dean received a BA in Anthropology and a BS in Earth & Space Exploration from Arizona State University. He also holds an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Arizona. His current research investigates the consequences of Pacific gray whale conservation-as-development for communities on the Baja California Peninsula, including the green capitalist proposition of whale-watching and the creation of the gray whale as an object of conservation priority. He also researches the political ecology of sport and outdoor recreation, including service as the Graduate Student Chair of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and the Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Political Ecology.

Abigail Smithson is a visual artist and podcaster who is also a Lecturer at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Her art practice is rooted in the appreciation, translation, and act of archiving objects that record their surroundings. She attempts to challenge the traditional ideas of representation and works to create photographs as documents, in a both nuanced and abstract way. The game of basketball has been a longtime muse for her and she follows and believes firmly in the New Craft Artists in Action collective motto, which is Participation vs. Spectatorship when it comes to sports. Through her podcast Dear Adam Silver as well as her visual work, she questions the current narrative around sports and art and how the two cultural entities overlap and live side by side. She was born and raised in Redwood City, CA.

Noah Cohan is Assistant Director and Lecturer of American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Cohan’s recent course offerings include "Empire of Hoop: Basketball as American Culture," “The Racialized Sporting Landscape of St. Louis: Athletics Aesthetics, Bias, and Opportunity,” “Sports & Society: Contemporary Issues in American Sports,” and “The Black Athlete in American Literature: From Frederick Douglass to LeBron James." Cohan’s book, We Average Unbeautiful Watchers: Fan Narratives and the Reading of American Sports, was published in July 2019 by the University of Nebraska Press. He is the co-editor of Sport in the University, a special issue of the journal American Studies (Fall 2016), founding coordinator of the Sports Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, co-convener of the AMCS program initiative in Sports and Society: Culture, Power, and Identity, and cocreator of Whereas Hoops, a multimedia work of scholarship and activism aimed at getting basketball hoops installed in St. Louis's Forest Park.