Derek Charles Catsam is Professor of History and the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas-Permian Basin and is Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, where he spent 2016 as the Hugh Le May Fellow in the Humanities. He is the author of Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement (2021), Freedom’s Main Line: the Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, (2009), Beyond the Pitch: The Spirit, Culture, and Politics of Brazil’s 2014 World Cup (2014) and Bleeding Red: A Red Sox Fan’s Diary of the 2004 Season (2005). He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on American sports and politics since World War I.