Join the KU Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) for a talk by Dr. Sarah Krasnoff (NYU) on October 29 at 3:30pm in the Beren Center. Her talk is titled "Beyond Paris 2024: Basketball Empire and a Growing Transatlantic Hoops Rivalry."

The talk is co-sponsored by the Department of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies, KU International Affairs, and the KC International Relations Council (IRC).

France pressed the U.S. men and women to a brace of thrilling finishes at the Paris 2024 Olympic basketball gold medal matches. It was the first time that the same two countries contested both finals, but it should be no surprise that these two teams were the last ones standing. That’s because France has become a basketball breeding ground, a major pipeline of talent into the NBA, WNBA, and NCAA, whose players are known as the “United States of basketball in Europe” for their physicality and athleticism. Join historian Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff for a behind-the-scenes look at Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023), which tells the backstory for how the Paris 2024 Olympic gold medal matches featured the growing France-United States hoops rivalry. Put history into present-day use by learning how generations of sports diplomacy between the United States, France, and francophone Africa is reshaping our global basketball world–and how these transatlantic connections represent evolutions and trends in other hoops hotbeds.

Dr. Lindsay Sarah Krasnoff is a globally-recognized sports diplomacy expert and Visiting Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University’s Tisch Institute for Global Sport. Specializing in Franco-United States relations, she is author of Basketball Empire: France and the Making of a Global NBA and WNBA (Bloomsbury, 2023) and The Making of Les Bleus: Sport in France, 1958-2010 (Lexington Books, 2013). Director of the FranceAndUS project, her work has appeared with outlets like TIME, CNN International, The Athletic, The Washington Post, The New Yorker.  A veteran of the U.S. Department of State’s Office of the Historian, Krasnoff holds a B.A. from George Washington University; M.A. from NYU; PhD in History from The Graduate Center, City University of New York.