De Montfort University is offering a fully-funded PhD through the Midlands 4 Cities Collaborative Doctoral Programme with The Hockey Museum. The doctoral student will work with Dr. Heather Dichter (sport history) and Dr. Serena Dyer (design and material culture history) and The Hockey Museum curatorial team on the project “Dressed for the Field: Gender, Bodies, and Society through the Material Culture of Field Hockey, 1880 to the present”.
Since field hockey’s establishment in the late nineteenth century, its clothing has reflected changing social attitudes to gendered bodies, comfort, and class. Working with The Hockey Museum’s (THM) wide-ranging and underutilised textile and printed ephemera collections, this M4C CDA will explore how men and women dressed for the field.
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 sartorial modification and adaptation. Male and female players’ uniforms have since changed dramatically, yet field 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, field hockey playing uniforms offer an opportunity to deepen understanding of the intersecting relationship between class, bodies, gender, and sport in British culture.
The project will make a theoretical and practical intervention in current debates in the histories of fashion and material culture, the body, and sport. THM’s extensive textile collection provides the foundation to understand changing representations of the performance of the playing body. Advertisements and industry collections will shed light on the commercialisation and manufacturing of hockey uniforms, while clothing regulations will reveal social changes and challenges to the presentation and representation of gender in field hockey. The critical examination of the transformation of field hockey’s material culture will contribute to the sparse scholarship on field hockey and on material culture within sport.
This project seeks to answer the following research questions:
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- What role has clothing played in shaping field hockey’s relationship with gender, class, and society?
- What does a material-culture approach reveal about this relationship?
- How has clothing determined and reflected the interrelationship between functionality and sartorial sport identity in field hockey clothing from the nineteenth century onwards?
- How have field hockey players been visually and materially represented in the media and advertising as the sport transformed into a multi-billion-dollar industry?
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Process
Following a material culture approach, which is attentive to the relationship between the materiality of the uniform and the bodies which wore them, analysis of THM’s textile collection will shed light into understanding the development of gender roles and identities in field hockey. The project will follow the Prownian approach to material culture (Prown, 1982), adapted by Mida and Kim (2018) for dress history. The student`s research will catalogue THM’s textile collection and produce a database of extant garments following a Prownian process of descriptions, deduction, and speculation.
Place
The PhD student will spend time at THM to research and catalogue the textile collection, as well as conduct research in their other collections, including images and photographs contained in publications and the governing bodies’ regulations. DMU’s Dr. Heather Dichter and Dr. Serena Dyer will provide the academic expertise and guidance alongside THM’s curatorial team. In addition, the PhD student will contribute to THM’s public outreach by creating a virtual exhibition of field hockey clothing on THM’s website, contributing to THM’s bi-weekly e-newsletter Hockey Shorts, and creating content for THM’s social media.
This project’s timeline is bookended by field hockey’s most visible event: the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games in Paris and Los Angeles, where Great Britain’s men’s and women’s teams are expected to receive extensive media coverage. The expert knowledge acquired through this project will permeate throughout THM, informing, enhancing and contextualising THM’s related areas of research and future exhibition programming.
Person
Applicants should have a background in material culture, fashion / textile history, gender history, or sport history. Individuals with a material culture or fashion / textile history background do not need to have knowledge of the sport of field hockey; similarly, applicants with a background in gender or sport history do not need to have knowledge of material culture or fashion / textile history.
For more information, please see the Midlands 4 Cities website. Applicants must complete the DMU application by November 30, 2023 as well as the the Midlands 4 Cities application, which is due by January 10, 2024. DMU is holding an online application writing workshop from 2-5 p.m. on Saturday, November 4, 2023. Book a place for the online information session here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/universityofleicester3/1014649.
Any questions about this funded PhD should be directed to Dr. Heather Dichter at heather.dichter@dmu.ac.uk
Contact Information
Dr. Heather L. Dichter
heather.dichter@dmu.ac.uk
