Kwame Agyemang, Ph.D.
George and Betty Blanda Endowed Professor in Sport Leadership, Director of the Future of Sport Institute (FoSI)
Dr. Kwame Agyemang, George and Betty Blanda Endowed Professor in Sport Leadership, is a professor of sport, organizations, and society and Director of the Future of Sport Institute (FoSI) at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include institutional and social change, in which he focuses on better understanding institutionally disruptive people and organizations. He is particularly interested in how social actors (e.g., athletes, sport organizations) manage and implement change. His papers appear in journals such as Journal of Sport Management, Organization, Journal of Management Inquiry, European Sport Management Quarterly, Sport Management Review, and Journal of African American Studies, among others. Moreover, he is currently writing a book (under contract with Cornell University/ILR Press) that presents leaders in the sport industry with a roadmap to undoing systemic racism within their organizations. Since 2020, Dr. Agyemang has served as the Editor-in-Chief for Sport, Business and Management: An International Journal.
Dr. Agyemang serves as the Program Faculty Chair for the Sport Leadership program. With more than ten years of experience as a university instructor, Dr. Agyemang is passionate about sport business education and developing future generations of purpose-driven sport industry leaders. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses within the program, including Management of Sport and Research Methods.
Since August 2023, Dr. Agyemang has served as the Director of FoSI (formerly the Institute for the Transformation of Sport), an institute that functions as a research-based platform for industry stakeholders that maintain an interest in the future of sport. Dr. Agyemang hopes the institute will play a central role in providing sport industry leaders with novel ideas and practices concerning how they and their organizations approach major shifts and transformation occurring in the sport industry.
Dr. Agyemang received his Ph.D. in sport management from Texas A&M University and both his M.Ed. (Higher Education Administration) and B.A. (political science) from the University of Oklahoma. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kentucky, he was an Associate Professor at The Ohio State University (2019-2023), Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University (2012-2019), and Assistant Professor at Eastern Kentucky University (2011-2012). He also spent an academic quarter at the University of California Davis Graduate School of Management as a visiting scholar in 2019. More recently, he took a sabbatical during the spring 2022 semester and was a visiting scholar at Nova School of Business and Economics in Portugal and Ashesi University in Ghana.