April 16 | 6 – 7:30pm
Join Kevin E. Simpson, author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust, for a presentation about the surprisingly powerful role soccer played during World War II.
From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, as concentration camps were built to hold so-called enemies, captives competed behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. Simpson uncovers this little-known piece of history, rescuing from obscurity many poignant survivor testimonies, old accounts of wartime players, and the diaries of survivors and perpetrators.
In victim accounts and rare photographs—many published for the first time in this book—hidden stories of soccer in almost every Nazi concentration camp appear. To these prisoners, soccer was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen. The book situates the victim experience at the center of the story and emphasizes what it means to exercise personal choice in the most dire of circumstances.
Prior to arriving at John Brown University—his alma mater— Dr. Kevin E. Simpson taught for 12 years in Portland, Oregon and briefly, in the wilds of rural Utah immediately after completing his PhD in counseling psychology at the University of Denver.
In 2019, Dr. Simpson was a Fulbright Scholar to the Slovak Republic where he taught graduate courses in sport psychology and psychology of the Holocaust at Comenius University in Bratislava. Simpson has been a research fellow three times at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2009, 2010, 2019) and a fellow in the 2011 Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern University (Illinois). His academic work has taken him to many concentration camps and Holocaust memorial sites in Ukraine, Poland, France, Germany, Austria, and the former Czechoslovakia. He has also been a visiting professor in two study abroad programs in London and Vienna and for the latter appointment, Simpson taught on the genocidal legacy of National Socialism in Austria.
Dr. Simpson considers it a privilege to teach students across a wide range of courses, including: Social and Abnormal Psychology; Sport and Exercise Psychology; Counseling Theory; the Psychology and History of the Holocaust; and the Integration of Faith and Psychology. His most recent publications have been on teaching comparative genocide through study abroad in Guatemala; genius and creativity; and the use of classic and modern propaganda in the teaching of social psychology. He also writes for outdoor magazines on the application of visualization and imagery principles in sport psychology to hunting and shooting pursuits.