Professor Emerita and Author
Political Theory, Identity Politics, Public Higher Education, Gender & Sports, Hannah Arendt
Jennifer Ring is a Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Reno. She received her Bachelor’s degree from UCLA and her Masters and Doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Ring has been a visiting professor at Berkeley, Stanford, and Columbia University. She has published books and articles in Political Theory, Feminist Theory, and Identity Politics in the U.S. Her two recent books, about women and baseball, have received widespread public attention. Her most recent publication, Saving Public Higher Education: Voices From The Wasteland , features oral history interviews with public university students from diverse racial and class backgrounds.
Jennifer Ring still teaches online courses at UNR from her home in Berkeley, California. She is the mother of two daughters, and the grandmother of three rambunctious kids, aged 2 to 7. She has always been active and athletic, with a particular passion for water sports…and baseball. To keep up with the kids, she works out daily with a trainer at a local gym. She has recently relinquished windsurfing and taken up Dragon Boat racing, to satisfy her need to be out on the San Francisco Bay. She is enjoying learning about the intricacies of that ancient sport.
Ring’s two books on Women and Baseball continue to receive attention from scholarly audiences and baseball readers and writers. Her most recent publication focuses on race and class in higher education.
Stolen Bases: Why American Girls Don’t Play Baseball (2009) describes baseball from its origins as a girls’ game in fifteenth century England, which evolved into the popular game of Rounders, crossed the Atlantic with English immigrants, and achieved instant popularity with both women and men in nineteenth century America. When baseball became a professional sport at the end of the nineteenth century, baseball men led by Albert Spalding expelled girls and women from the game. Little League Baseball segregated girls into softball, but girls and women in the twenty first century continue to battle for access to the game they invented and have always loved. Stolen Bases is required reading in many university courses on sports history and sociology, gender and sports and baseball history.
A Game of Their Own: Voices of Contemporary Women in Baseball (2015) chronicles the current (and largely unknown) state of elite women’s baseball, with oral histories of ten players on the 2010 USA Baseball Women’s National Team. The starting lineup of Team USA 2010 offer in-depth oral history interviews of their journeys to play baseball at the highest level, despite a nation that seeks to exclude them from its “national pastime.” The book was named one of the three best baseball books of 2015 by The Christian Science Monitor and The Daily Beast and was favorably reviewed in Sports Illustrated. It was named one of the Fifty Greatest Baseball Books of All time in The Huntington Post. Transcripts and original audio recordings the oral history interviews of the ballplayers are archived in the permanent collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York.
Saving Public Higher Education: Voices from the Wasteland (2022) is Ring’s most recent book, written with two former students, Trisden Shaw and Reece Gibb. The three authors utilize in-depth interviews with eleven University of Nevada students of different racial, class and ethnic backgrounds to explore the impact of racism and economic inequality at their public university. The book is an exercise in student-led Freirean pedagogy. The students gathered collectively after their interviews to consider ways to restore public higher education to its original purpose as the driver of American democracy. The recent Trump-inspired assault on all levels of public education make the issues addressed in Saving Public Higher Education especially urgent.