Dr. Hanhan Xue is an associate professor of sport management in the Department of Health, Sport, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Kansas. Born and raised in China and educated and professionally trained in Canada and the U.S., she brings a multifaceted understanding of today’s complex cross-cultural sport business environment—the global perspective students need as leagues, teams, and brands increasingly compete across borders. Dr. Xue earned her Ph.D. in Physical Education, Sport, and Recreation, with a concentration in sport organizations and management, from the University of Alberta in Canada. Before joining KU, she was an associate professor of sport management at Florida State University.
Dr. Xue's scholarship appears in top-tier sport management journals such as European Sport Management Quarterly, Journal of Sport Management, Sociology of Sport Journal, and Leisure Studies—a record that keeps her courses grounded in current, peer-reviewed evidence. Her two primary lines of research are: 1) sport organizations’ stakeholder strategies and legitimacy building in foreign markets and 2) emerging digital technologies in the sport industry. Her work on transnational sport business—including liability-of-foreignness studies of the NBA’s arena development in China, stakeholder influence strategies, and the shifting stakeholder map of the Formula One Grand Prix in Shanghai—examines how sport organizations survive and potentially develop sustained competitive advantage as they enter emerging host markets. This inquiry informs the organizational and strategic challenges sport teams/leagues face that students learn to diagnose in her courses.
She is also a leading scholar of the esports industry, where her research maps the industry’s economic and cultural impact and what it means for emerging teams and leagues. Her study of esports crowdfunding in the International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal applies a social exchange theoretical lens to explain what helps esports communities secure campaign funding from the general public; and her work on the esports player community on Reddit, published in Leisure Studies, traces how narrative community forms and where inequalities emerge in this fast-growing field; her analysis of Twitch viewership, published in the Journal of Sport Management, examines how attention and audience demand interact in the digital (e)sport economy. For students, this offers an evidence-informed view of one of sport’s most dynamic new markets. More recently, she has turned to artificial intelligence in sport management, helping students critically examine how AI technologies are reshaping scholarship and managerial decision-making across the sport industry.
Dr. Xue has experience teaching across the undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels in both face-to-face and online formats, with a focus on strategic management, sport governance, and qualitative research methods. She has served as major professor for seven doctoral students, chaired 90 non-thesis master’s committees, and served on numerous doctoral and master’s committees, including as an external member at the University of Minnesota and the University of South Carolina. Beyond formal advising, she served as honorary advisor to the Women in Sport Association (WISA) at Florida State University.
Across the field, Dr. Xue serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Electronic Gaming and Esports and is a frequent peer reviewer for more than twenty scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Sport Management, Sport Management Review, European Sport Management Quarterly, Managing Sport and Leisure, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Communication & Sport, Sport in Society, the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, and Leisure Sciences. She has also been an invited grant reviewer for the Economic and Social Research Council in the United Kingdom, and is an active member of the North American Society for Sport Management, the European Association for Sport Management, the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, and the Strategic Management Society—connections that keep her, and her students, engaged into the field’s leading research and professional networks.