The following is a listing of professional achievements by Chico State faculty, staff, and students. Submit your professional achievements to ucomm@csuchico.edu.
Awards, Honors, and Activities
Rings of Dissent: Boxing and Performances of Rebellion, co-edited by Chico State Professor David Leonard, earned the Best Anthology Award for 2026 from the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH), one of the leading scholarly organizations dedicated to the study of sport history.
The award recognizes the anthology’s innovative exploration of boxing as a powerful source of resistance, identity formation, and political expression.
While boxing is often framed as a brutal and intensely individualistic sport, Rings of Dissent reveals how fighters transform the ring—and everything surrounding it, from entrances and weigh-ins to press conferences and post-fight interviews—into stages for rebellion, activism, community-building, and self-expression.
Bringing together essays, interviews, and cultural analysis, the collection centers the lived experiences of marginalized boxers whose performances inside and outside the ring challenge dominant narratives of race, gender, nationalism, masculinity, and capitalism. Across the anthology, contributors illuminate how boxing has long served as a space where fighters contest social inequalities and assert alternative visions of identity, belonging, and resistance.
Leonard is chair of Chico State’s Ethnic, Gender, and Queer Studies Department. Co-editors are Gaye Theresa Johnson, associate professor of Black studies and the director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Rudy Mondragón, assistant professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Loyola Marymount University.
“This recognition from NASSH affirms the importance of examining boxing not simply as a sport dominated by a handful of notable heroes or merely as a space of entertainment, but as a critical arena where struggles over power, representation, democracy, freedom and justice unfold,” said the editors in a joint statement. “The book highlights the many ways fighters use boxing to challenge systems of oppression and to articulate and create possibilities for community and the political imagination.”
The North American Society for Sport History’s Best Anthology Award honors edited collections that make exceptional scholarly contributions to the understanding of sport history and culture.
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