Chris is a journalist and former broadcast news producer, now an academic historian specialising in the relationship between political culture and sport in the US.
His first book, Bill Clinton at the Church of Baseball, published in 2023, explores the intimate relationship between two troubled American institutions – the presidency and Major League Baseball – during the turbulent 1990s.
Chris’ thirty-year career in the broadcast news industry, working for the BBC and Sky News, was dominated by politics.
He covered six US presidential elections from Clinton’s first run in 1992 to Obama’s re-election in 2012, and six UK general elections from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron. He attended international diplomatic summits, organized coverage from war zones and natural disasters and was at the heart of many of the world’s biggest breaking news stories for three decades.
He received an International Emmy Award for leading Sky News coverage of the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London.
While work was all politics and breaking news – his downtime has been dominated by sports. For more than fifty years, Chris has had what he admits is an unhealthy obsession with Arsenal Football Club, attending virtually every home game since the age of nine. He also travels the world watching England failing to get across the line in international football tournaments (he’s attended every World Cup since 1990) and has recently begun following England’s cricket team on their usually unsuccessful overseas tours.
While working in Washington in 1998, Chris set himself the target of going to every Major League Baseball club as an incentive to experience America beyond the coastal belts, a feat he finally accomplished when he ticked-off a Royals game at Kauffman Stadium in 2010. En route to the complete MLB set – which took thousands of miles of driving over several summers – he also took in minor league baseball, from the Atlantic League in South Carolina to the Pioneer League in Montana, while squeezing in NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS games across the country whenever the opportunity arose.
Chris has a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford and a Masters and PhD in US History from King’s College London. He lives in London where he combines his research and writing with lecturing in journalism at City St. George’s, University of London.
*
You can read our conversation, A Journey Through The Fraying Of America, here.
***
Chris Birkett’s book, Bill Clinton at the Church of Baseball: The Presidency, Civil Religion and the National Pastime in the 1990s (Mercer University Press, 2023) is available on Amazon or directly from the publisher.
*
You can listen to Chris being interviewed about the book on the History with Jackson podcast here:
*
Chris’s essay, “He’d Like to be Savior of the National Pastime: Bill Clinton and the 1994-95 Baseball Strike” is published in Sports and the American Presidency, From Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump edited by Adam Burns and Rivers Gambrell (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
**
States of Play 