This book owes a great debt to an extraordinary group of colleagues and students in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Many of the book’s ideas and arguments were first developed for lectures in an undergraduate course on Media and Modernity that I have taught at SFU for more than eight years. In several instances, student questions and discussion in this class helped to refine my thinking. I particularly want to thank the many graduate students whom I’ve had the good fortune to work with in my time at Simon Fraser. I have learned far more from them than they have from me. Special thanks go to Anouk Bélanger, James Compton, Mark Lowes, and Timothy Adcock Gibson, who were members of a reading group on “the politics of spectacle” that I organized in the late 1990s, held on a weekly basis in the Jolly Taxpayer pub in Vancouver. More recently, I want to acknowledge Dugan Nichols and Peter Zuurbier who were stellar graduate teaching assistants in the Media and Modernity course and always willing to sit down and talk about theories and histories of modernity.

A number of academic colleagues and graduate students either commented upon individual chapters or suggested valuable resources for research. I want to thank Doug Booth, Richard Martin, John Loy, Bill Morgan, Patricia Vertinsky, and Stephen Hardy for commentaries on the opening chapter, as well as Donald Kyle for bibliographic suggestions that helped me negotiate the terrain of Greco-Roman history. An early draft of chapter 2 was written at the invitation of Jonathan Finn as an Open Access article for the Canadian online journal Amodern 3 (2014). I want to thank Jonathan for his suggestions in revising an original draft of the article, as well as those of two anonymous reviewers. Doug Booth, John Loy, Patricia Vertinsky, and Stephen Hardy also provided comments on the essay, as well as John Horne, David Whitson, Emma Griffin, Toby Miller, Alan Tomlinson, Robert Prey, Scott Timcke, Richard Holt, and Rob Beamish.

Chapter 3 owes an immense debt to John Horne, whose collaboration on another project was instrumental in developing my understanding of sporting “mega-events.” The chapter also takes considerable inspiration from Ben Carrington, who has been pushing me for years to add a stronger postcolonial flavor to my work. This chapter was also influenced by comments raised in discussions of sporting spectacles and modernity with Scott Timcke, Shawn Forde, Gavin Weedon, Brian Wilson, Patricia Vertinsky, and Carolyn Prouse.

Chapter 4 began as a talk presented at the Sixth Rome Conference on Critical Theory in 2013. I want to thank Beverley Best and Enda Brophy for collegial support and attendance at the initial presentation. Some of the ideas in chapter 4 were also included in the Alan G. Ingham Memorial address that I gave at the annual meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport in 2015. My SFU colleagues, Shane Gunster and Andrew Feenberg, helped me rediscover an interest in the Frankfurt School. Andrew Feenberg and Jerry Zaslove also provided useful comments on the near-final draft of the chapter.

Chapter 5 evolved from a book chapter originally written in 2010 for a Festschrift for my friend, Bruce Kidd. That chapter was finally published in 2015 in a collection edited by Russell Field, Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. I revised the chapter for a talk at Concordia University in the fall of 2011 at the invitation of Beverley Best, and many of the ideas arising from discussions after the Concordia talk are incorporated into the chapter in this book. I also want to thank John Horne (again) for ideas that came out of our numerous conversations as co-editors in 2015 of a book on Mega-Events and Globalization (Routledge). The chapter included here integrates ideas from the original essay from 2010 with arguments and ideas from an essay on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and neoliberalism that Bob Neubauer and I wrote in 2012, as well as some of the arguments that John and I included in our introduction to Mega-Events and Globalization. The chapter has also benefited from ideas raised by Anouk Bélanger, Rob Beamish, Mike Davis, Shawn Forde, Carolyn Prouse, Brian Wilson, Courtney Szto, Lyndsay Hayhurst, Kevin Fox Gotham, Jules Boykoff, Yuezhi Zhao, and Katherine Reilly.

Finally, I want to thank Amy Soo for help with manuscript preparation, as well as the extraordinary patience shown by John Thompson and the Polity Press production team. I first conceived this project for Polity in the early 2000s but was not able to complete it for health and family reasons. When I finally did complete a working draft of the book at hand, in the summer of 2016, I was stricken with a near-fatal blood infection and forced to spend several months in hospital. It is impossible to thank the doctors and nurses in the ICU at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver enough, as well as the teams of doctors and nurses at Saint Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, who nursed me back to health through the fall of 2016. Above all, however, I want to thank my partner, Shelley Bentley, for everything she has done; not only for supporting me steadfastly through my illness with such patience and grace, but also for tolerating the indulgence that this book represents. Our children, Danielle, Charlotte, and Jesse, also suffered through my illness but were always there to offer support when needed. I also want to thank my colleague Martin Laba for the unwavering support he offered my family and me in this difficult time, not to mention his frequent hospital visits and the mango sorbet he used to bring me. The book is dedicated to Shelley, Dani, Char, Jesse and Martin, whose love and care pulled me through an exceptionally difficult time.

Bowen Island, 2017