Yoonkyu Song receives ISHPES „Young Scholar Award“
At the 2026 ISHPES Congress in Taiwan, Yoonkyu Song was presented with the ISHPES “Young Scholar Award” by the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport (ISHPEShttps://www.ishpes.org/). He also delivered a highly acclaimed keynote address at this year’s conference in Taipei (Taiwan), in which he discussed comparative aspects of sports history in general and specifically in Germany and Korea.
Yoonkyu Song, a member of the WGI, is currently pursuing his doctoral studies in the department Education and Culture in Sport research area at the IfS Münster. Through the WGI, the OSRC’s 11+ Network, and the European Council for Research in Physical Education and School Sport (CEREPS), he is actively involved in international networks for the history of sport and Olympic studies.
His doctoral dissertation, provisionally titled “Memory, Critique, and Adjustment: A Comparative Historical Study of Sport Development in West Germany and South Korea during the Cold War”—supervised by Prof. Dr. Michael Krüger—examines the development of sports systems and changing conceptions of sport and physical culture in West Germany and South Korea, with a focus on sports policy, physical education, sports science, and the Olympic Movement.
Yoonkyu Song’s win of the “2026 ISHPES Gigliola Gori Young Scholar Award” continues a long tradition of successful sports history research at the University of Münster in an international context. In 2000, Annette Hofmann—now president of the ICSSPE—received the ISHPES Young/Early Scholar Award; Kai Reinhart won the award in 2009, and Emanuel Hübner in 2014. Lukas Rehmann received the Routledge Presentation Award in 2019 at the ISHPES Congress. All of these award winners studied sports history in Münster.