Aims

Our network seeks to foster dialogue between scholars from different disciplines working on different aspects of the Cold War. Our aim is to act as a clearing house of information and as a facilitator for discussion across the traditional disciplinary and geographical boundaries, thus improving the quality of interdisciplinary and transnational discussions about the cultures of the Cold War.

We are not merely interested in Cold War culture, such as art and literature during the Cold War. Rather, we conceive our topic more broadly as concerned with the cultures of the Cold War. By ‘cultures of the Cold War’ we mean all those experiences, structures of feelings, impressions and interpretations that decision makers, protesters, artists, writers, journalists and ‘normal’ individuals developed, in East and West, in the Soviet Union and in Asia, in Europe and the United States. We speak of ‘cultures’ in the plural, because we believe that it is important to take account of the multiplicity and diversity of Cold War experiences in order to link the local and the global, the regional and the national.

It is only after an era has ended that historians can hope to grasp the nature of an age. Our network hopes to contribute to such a post-Cold War history of the present by showing how pervasive the Cold War was across the world. It was, in Melvyn Leffler’s words, a ‘war for the soul of mankind’ (Melvyn Leffler).

We look forward to hearing from those interested in joining the discussion.

Holger Nehring
Adam Piette