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PhD vacancy ‘The historical development of sports in Belgian seaside resorts’ (VLIZ) – deadline 9 November 2025
The VLIZ (Flanders Marine Institute) has a vacancy for a PhD fellowship on ‘The historical development of sports in Belgian seaside resorts: Navigating between health promotion and entertainment’.
This PhD project looks at how sports acquired a central place in Belgian seaside resorts, from the early developments midway the nineteenth century until the massification of tourism during the 1960s. The study aims to map out the wide range of sports, including (but not limited to) cycling, tennis, golf, sailing, and rowing. It will link these activities to different infrastructures and look at how they shaped social encounters among players and spectators of all social classes, while zooming in on the entrepreneurs and associations managing sport facilities and events. The focus on the latter eyes to uncover how sports entrepreneurship was entangled with the pioneering health-business model of coastal towns and with other entertainment industries that developed alongside, not least gambling.
This project will be jointly developed at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) in Ostend (Belgium), under the supervision of Dr Torsten Feys, leader of the research Team Maritime Society & History, and Ghent University (Belgium) under the supervision of Professor Bram Constandt of the Department of Movement and Sports Sciences and Professor Christophe Verbruggen of the Department of History.
Applications should be submitted ultimately 9 November 2025.
