Daniel T. Durbin is a professor of communication and director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg. He created the African-American Experience in Major League Baseball oral histories project, a research initiative to record the oral histories of all the remaining African-American baseball players who played in the Major Leagues in the 25 years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier.

Durbin has published numerous articles on sports, popular culture, rhetoric, media and philosophy. He has also been lead investigator on a series of grants from the LA’84 Foundation. His current research interests include a rethinking of the entire process of sport as performative public discourse. He is also writing a book tracing the massive social changes that remade Los Angeles and Hollywood in the summer of 1947.

Durbin has been special guest lecturer on sports, rhetoric and social change at numerous universities, including the University of Alabama, the University of Idaho and Emerson College.

Durbin has appeared as an expert in sports, public discourse and popular culture hundreds of times across a wide variety of news media including the CBS Nightly News, the NBC Nightly News, CNN International, BBC-TV, CBC-TV, NPR, the NFL Network, HBO-Sports, KCBS-TV, KCOP-TV, KCAL-TV, KFWB-NewsRadio, the Hearst News Syndicate, Time Magazine, U.S. News and World Report and BBC Scotland. Durbin appears regularly on KCBS-Radio, KQED-Radio and is often quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and many other news outlets.