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Cold War Classics

The APGRD began working with colleagues in the Akademie věd České republiky (Czech Academy of Sciences), the Univerzita Karlova (Charles University), and St Andrews, in 2023 on a large-scale digital project entitled Cold War Classics, which examines the intersections between classical scholarship and the performance repertoires in Czechoslovakia and in Britain between 1947-1989.

The project focuses on four crucial years during the Cold War - 1947, 1956, 1968 and 1989 - in Czechoslovakia and Britain, and is interested in how engagements with the relatively stable referent of Greco-Roman antiquity might reveal how ideologies (both dominant and countercultural) are made manifest in the cultural sphere.

Photograph of bundles of Theatre World magazines from 1947, 1956 and 1953
Theatre World magazines, APGRD Collections
Our collection of Theatre World magazines, donated by the children of Graham Palmer, provide invaluable information on historic performance repertoires.

Through comparative and discursive analysis the aim is to uncover the connections and differences in the contexts that defined the East-West divide of the Cold War.  Cold War cultural histories have tended to emphasise the polarity engendered by the ideological split between the socialist and capitalist worlds. We will examine how power, in both the Eastern Bloc and the West, constituted itself through censorial interventions or normative demands and regulations in sometimes surprisingly similar ways.

In both countries there is an increasing concern that the recent history of the Cold War is being forgotten. The project is developing a bilingual website (now in beta stage in Prague), which is designed primarily with the general public, secondary school and undergraduate students in mind, and which contains short essays, images, timelines, interviews, film and newsreels making it widely accessible and interactive.

Composite image; on the left a black and white photograph (circa 1960) of the gigantic monument to Stalin in Prague, Letná, on the right two colleagues visiting the graffitied base of the toppled monument in 2023
Stalin monument in Letná was built in 1955 and destroyed in 1962
Martin Pšenička and Fiona Macintosh, during the first of the collaborative research workshops, at what remains of the base of the gigantic Stalin monument in Letná (Prague).

Research Workshops

  • Prague, September 2023: the first three-day collaborative workshop, focusing on the years 1948-55.
  • Online, October 2024: the second two-day collaborative workshop, focusing on the years 1956-67.
  • St Andrews, May 2025: the third three-day collaborative workshop, focussing on the years 1968-89, will be hosted by the University of St Andrew's Centre for Receptions of Antiquity (SACRA). This intensive workshop will also discuss engendering new collaborations and ways to scale up the project.

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