Steven Pope is the former director of the International Center for Performance Excellence at West Virginia University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maine and his B.A. and M.A. at Hope College and the University of Connecticut. He is author of Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination, 1876-1926; editor of The New American Sport History: Recent Approaches and Perspectives; and co-editor (with John Nauright) of The Routledge Companion to Sports History. He was a Leverhulme Research Fellow at De Montfort University (United Kingdom) in 2003 and served as program leader of American Studies at the University of Lincoln (United Kingdom) between 2004 and 2008.