John Nauright

John Nauright, PhD is Professor in the School of Education and Social Work teaching Sport and Australian Culture at The University of Sydney in Australia where he is also the coordinator of the Sport, Movement and Social & Human Development (SMASHD) Research Group at The University of Sydney. He is Director of the Global Rugby Leadership Institute (GRLI) based in Gettysburg, PA, USA and is a Visiting Professor at universities in Ghana, Barbados, China, India, and the Ukraine.

 He has worked and researched on rugby for many years. He is former Vice-President of the Dallas Griffins, now the Dallas Jackals, a Major League Rugby franchise. He was a Programme Consultant and participant for the four-part BBC series The Union Game on the history and culture of world rugby. Professor Nauright led the official academic conference for the Festival of Rugby for the 2015 Rugby World Cup and through the GRLI ran subsequent conferences during Rugby World Cups including the first Women’s rugby conference in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2022. He has produced 26 books on the global sports industry and hundreds of other refereed publications, which have received over 5,000 academic citations. Four of his books have won awards for academic excellence with two of these being the rugby books Making Men: Rugby and Masculine Identity and Rugby and the South African Nation. With Tony Collins he produced The Rugby World in the Professional Era, and with Timothy Chandler both Making Men and Making the Rugby World: Race, Gender, Commerce. He is currently part of a management group working with thosse seeking to grow women’s professional rugby in the USA and internationally.