The Hockey Museum (THM) has been awarded a Midlands 4 Cities (M4C) Collaborative Doctoral Award with De Montfort University (DMU).

This funded PhD project, Dressed for the Field: Gender, Bodies, and Society through the Material Culture of Field Hockey, 1880 to the Present, will delve into THM’s extensive textile collection. The supervisor team includes Dr. Heather Dichter, a member of DMU’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture and a THM Trustee, and Dr. Serena Dyer, historian of fashion and dress and an expert in material culture.

This project will examine how the material, embodied and gendered dynamics of clothing intersect with the complex social and cultural evolution of field hockey since its development as a modern sport in the late nineteenth century. Victorian women hockey players had to navigate contemporary sartorial norms: corsets, bustles and ankle-length skirts could not be discarded, necessitating nuanced strategies of modification and adaptation. Male and female players’ uniforms have since changed dramatically, yet hockey remains one of the few sports where women mostly still wear skirts.

Through THM’s extensive garment collection, images and advertisements in publications, and regulations regarding uniforms, the student will explore how social trends and technological advances in clothing manufacturing have interacted with changing notions of bodily comfort, motion, movement, and the performance of the sportsman/woman’s body. Shaped by gendered distinction, national identity, and the British class system, hockey playing uniforms offer an opportunity to deepen understanding of the intersecting relationship between class, bodies, gender, and sport in British culture.

Information about the project can be found on the M4C website, click here.

Applications will be able to be submitted as of 16 October 2023, with the deadline in early January 2024. The selected student will begin their doctoral studies at De Montfort University in October 2024.