Matthew Briones: Exploring Historic Connections

Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AANHPI) observed in May in the United States and Canada, celebrates the rich and diverse history, cultural heritage, and contributions that generations of AANHPIs have made to American history, society, and culture. During the month of May, we are honoring the diversity of our AANPHI community by highlighting and commemorating the important contributions of remarkable scholars who have helped enrich the educational excellence and reputation of the University of Chicago. 

Fun fact: AANHPI month celebrates people whose origins and ancestry include countries such as China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to name but a few.

How can baseball help explain the history of the United States? How have the interactions of Black Americans and Asian Americans shaped U.S. politics and society?

Matt Briones has thought a lot about these seemingly unrelated topics, and he’s found connections between them. An associate professor in the University of Chicago Department of History who specializes in U.S. cultural history, Briones teaches the class Baseball and American Culture and researches the history of relations between Black and Asian Americans. 

These intellectual pursuits reflect his own experiences. A first-generation American son of Filipino immigrants, Briones has been passionate about baseball ever since childhood, when he would spend hours practicing his fielding by throwing a tennis ball against the backyard basement wall of his family’s Boston suburban home. To this day, he remains “a hopeless, diehard Red Sox fan.”

Baseball is “a remarkably appropriate and useful lens for understanding and teaching American history,” Briones told UChicago Magazine, which published a profile of him in 2016. Through this lens, the course examines “race, gender, sexuality, and class. They’re talking about baseball in a way that…they haven’t talked about it before.”

Briones began his own college studies majoring in English at Harvard University, with a focus on Black American writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. “I was definitely drawn to African American writers because of my own experiences as part of a racialized group,” he says.  

He stayed at Harvard for graduate school but turned his attention to history. “I wanted even greater context for what I was reading in lit classes, so I returned to Harvard for an interdisciplinary PhD in American Studies,” Briones explains.

His research focused on race, but not the common focus on relations between white and Black Americans. “What about blacks and Asians?” he asks in the alumni magazine story. “It’s important to remember those interracial alliances. It tells a different story.”

After teaching at Harvard, Princeton University, Columbia University and the University of Michigan, Briones joined the UChicago faculty in 2009. He is faculty director of the Teaching Fellows in the Social Sciences program and a faculty affiliate with UChicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture and Center for East Asian Studies. Briones has received a Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Most recently, he wrote “Filipino Grief in Five Acts,” a poignant account of losing his mother to cancer and an examination of how Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders could benefit from mental health care and therapy. He also is working on a history of race, politics and sports in the U.S. based on his teaching and "Illusion Fields: Baseball and U.S. History,” a talk he gave as part of UChicago’s Harper Lectures series.

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2024 Presidential Proclamation of AANHPI month

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Thank you for celebrating AANPHI month with us! 

Sincerely,

F&A DEIB Committee