Cold War Classics (CWC) 1947-1989
Cold War Classics is an interdisciplinary and transnational project, exploring the ways in which ancient Greco-Roman culture was selectively interpreted, appropriated or suppressed to advance political agendas and bolster Cold War narratives on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
It is a collaboration between colleagues in Charles University (Prague), The Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague), the University of St Andrews and the University of Oxford. In May 2025, thanks to the support of the Charles University – University of St Andrews Joint Seed Funding Scheme, St Andrews Centre for the Receptions of Antiquity (SACRA) will welcome to St Andrews our Czech colleagues (pictured above). During the intensive workshop we will share and discuss new research findings, and consider future directions for the project.
The CWC project focuses attention on a spine of crucial years in the Cold War (1947, 1956, 1968 and 1989) in Czechoslovakia and Britain. We are interested in how the lens of engagements with the relatively stable referent of Greco-Roman antiquity might reveal how ideologies (dominant and countercultural) manifest in the cultural sphere.
We will explore theatrical and literary receptions of antiquity as multilateral sites of negotiation, confrontation, regulation and disruption with intense social impact. Through comparative and discursive analysis we will 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 May 2025 we will host a three-day intensive workshop at SACRA. During this time we can explore the above-stated ideas, engender new collaborations, and discuss how we might be able to scale up the project for the next phase of research. We are particularly looking forward to welcoming colleagues with specialisms in the receptions of antiquity in other regions, in the so-called Age of the Three Worlds, to explore how the project might operate in a truly global context.
Henry Stead (Co-Director of SACRA) July 2024