The APGRD benefits from a number of interdisciplinary research partnerships with a wide network of international and UK-based projects and institutions.
Akademie věd České republiky
The Akademie věd České republiky (Czech Academy of Sciences) and APGRD have developed a research project Cold War Classics, which involves a comparison of theatre, classics, and scholarship in the East and West of Europe from 1946 to 1989. Funding from the Czech Academy will allow for the development of an interactive website to showcase the project's research findings.
Annual Joint Postgraduate Symposium
The APGRD has been running an Annual Joint Postgraduate Symposium with the University of London on the Performance of Greek and Roman Drama since 2000. This two-day event is spent both in London and in Oxford, and provides a forum for postgraduates from all over the world who work on ancient drama as practitioners, writers or researchers in Classics, Theatre, and Translation Studies. In recently years the symposium has been generously supported by the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and the Classical Association, enabling us to make travel bursaries available for students.
CHORUS
Building on the decade long partnership between the APGRD and Nanterre Paris Ouest (Histoire des Arts et des Représentations), established by Christian Biet and Fiona Macintosh, the CHORUS network was created in 2023 in order to foster dialogue between researchers on the reception of Ancient Drama in performance and in translation from antiquity to the present. It brings together academics and creators from over 30 institutions based in the UK, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Poland. The network organises an annual two-day conference in April.
DANSOX (Dance Scholarship Oxford)
The APGRD is proud of its affiliation with Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX), based at St Hilda's College Oxford, which provides a major forum for dance scholarship internationally, promoting dialogue between prominent academic disciplines and the worlds of dance theory and practice. The APGRD and DANSOX co-host regular events relating to ancient Graeco-Roman dance, the idea of the ancient dancer in the modern world, contemporary choreography of ancient drama and epic and on choral movement in dance drama and theatre.
Hemispheric Institute, New York University
The academic partnership with NYU's Hemispheric Institute began in September 2023 when our Archiving Performance in the Digital Present project brought together members of HEMI, ReTAGS, and the APGRD to discus issues relating to the documenting performances from across the global south. Since then, HEMI, APGRD, and ReTAGS have taken initial steps to form a research consortium.
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft
In 2022, the APGRD was granted funds under the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership scheme (OXIBER) to collaborate with the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin, to begin work on a project entitled 'Shaping antiquity through the archive: construction, reconstruction, composition'. Sixteen researchers from Oxford and Berlin, including doctoral and early career researchers as well as the projects' two archivists, participated in two workshops in Oxford (May 2022) and Berlin (July 2022). Drawing on their respective archival collections, the researchers focussed on a central question: what does a history of theatre and performance look like when it attends to the specificities (in terms of production, distribution, and curation) of different media? OXIBER provided further funding to support a two-week scoping project APGRD research associate Marcus Bell, focussed on the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft's audiovisual archives (June 2024).
ReTAGS
The APGRD has been working closely with the Mellon-funded ReTAGS project (Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South) at the University of Cape Town since 2020 when ReTAGS’s Principal Investigator Mark Fleishman delivered an APGRD Public Lecture while on a research trip to Oxford. Since then, the two projects have co-organised a series of workshops related to Performing Archives in the Digital Present and co-hosted two international hybrid conferences on Tragedy in the Global South, in Oxford (September 2023) and in Cape Town (November 2023). In 2022, APGRD doctoral student Leo Kershaw was hosted by the ReTAGS team during a research trip, and Mark Fleishman and his Co-Investigator Mandla Mbothwe discussed their project on the APGRD Podcast.