The fully funded PhD is a collaboration between De Montfort University Leicester and the National Paralympic Heritage Trust (NPHT).

Whoever is selected will have the opportunity to access archives to tell the "visual history" of Paralympic sports in Britain for the first time.

They will be based at the NPHT offices in Aylesbury, which is close to Stoke Mandeville where the Paralympic Movement was first born.

Dr Beatriz Pichel of the university's Photographic History Research Centre will supervise the work, alongside associate professor Dr Heather Dichter, of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture.

"It's not just an interesting PhD project," said Pichel. 

"It will give the student so many skills - academic research, curating an exhibition and finding these incredible stories.

"We supervise a lot of students on this kind of collaborative scholarship - we have current students based at the V&A (Victoria and Albert) and the National Science and Media Museum."

The project is due to start after the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics and conclude before the start of Paris 2024.

It is part of the Midlands4Cities programme, aiming to increase the number of people studying arts and humanities at universities in the region.

"The student will have the opportunity to get not only history PhD training, but also they will have the heritage and exhibition training as well," Dichter said. 

"There are many different routes into this.

"Applicants can have backgrounds in sports history, disability history, photographic history or British history.

"The Midlands has a very rich Paralympic tradition, we have so many national governing bodies who are based here and we are very excited to be working with the NPHT on this project."

The closing date for applications is January 14.