The University of Texas at Austin

Faculty Member, Kinesiology & Health Education

Professor, Roy J. McLean Fellow in Sport History

Education

About

Jan Todd, the Roy J. McLean Fellow in Sport History, is a Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at the University of Texas at Austin.  Todd directs the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Sport Studies; serves on the Sport Management faculty; and teaches classes in sport history, sport philosophy, and sport and ethics. Todd also serves as co-editor of Iron Game History: The Journal of Physical Culture, a scholarly periodical exploring the history of exercise and physical fitness founded by the Todds in 1990.  In 2011 Todd was also made a Fellow in the American Kinesiology Academy, one of the highest honors in her profession. 

Jan Todd, and her husband, Terry Todd, are the founders and co-directors of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports on the campus of UT-Austin.  (www.starkcenter.org.)  The Stark Center  contains the largest archive in the world devoted to the study of physical fitness, resistance training, and alternative medicine.  The collection, put together by the Todds,  is regularly used by on-campus and visiting scholars and by Todd’s sport history Ph.D. students. The center opened in the Fall of 2009 and covers 27,500 square feet of space.  It contains museum exhibits as well as a research library and archive.  The Stark Center was made possible by a 5.5 million dollar grant received from the Nelda C. and H.J. Lutcher Stark Foundation of Orange, Texas, and by a two million dollar grant from the Joe Weider Foundation of Los Angeles, California. 

Todd’s research focuses on the history of exercise, particularly exercise for women.  She has written two books: Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women (Mercer University Press, 1998), and (with Terry Todd) Lift Your Way to Youthful Fitness (Little-Brown, 1985), the first popular book to argue that weight training could be used to offset the aging process.  In addition, Todd has written more than a hundred articles in popular and scholarly journals on various aspects of sport and exercise history, anabolic steroids, strength training, and exercise.  Todd lectures frequently and, in 2008 was the Seward Staley Honor Lecturer for the North American Society for Sport History.  In 2010 Todd was a keynote speaker at the  International Conference on Body Enhancement and (Il)legal Drugs in Sport at sponsored by Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation in Copenhagen. And, in 2011, Todd was the keynote speaker at the first National Conference for The Association for Girls and Women in Sports held at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Todd’s interest in the academic study of sport and exercise grew from her personal involvement in the sport of powerlifting.  In the 1970s and early 1980s, Todd was considered by both Sports Illustrated and the Guinness Book of Records to be the “strongest woman in the world.”  Todd set world records in five bodyweight classes during her 12-year powerlifting career and was the first woman inducted into the International Powerlifting Hall of Fame.  She was also inducted in the first class of the  Women’s Powerlifting Hall of Fame (2005), and received the 2008 Oscar Heidenstam Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award (in Great Britain) for her contributions in the field of physical fitness.  In March of 2009, she was inducted into the National (US) Fitness Hall of Fame for her work as a pioneering athlete and educator.

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