Dr Barbara Day

Barbara Day graduated from Manchester University in the UK with a BA Hons. Drama degree in 1965. After a year in at the Drama Academy in Prague she spent several years in the theatre before obtaining a Cert. Ed. and working in drama in education. In 1980 she registered at Bristol University to write her PhD dissertation on the Czech theatre of the 1960s. In 1985 she organised the Bristol Czechfest and also began to publish articles in the British and international press. Through this she became involved in the unofficial culture in Czechoslovakia, and the same year joined the Jan Hus Educational Foundation, involved in supporting the underground seminars and samizdat in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. After 1989 she helped to establish the foundation in Czechoslovakia, and since the 1990s has been teaching at SIT, CERGE-UPCES and DAMU, as well as translating for Prague Castle, Czech Academy of Sciences, National Gallery, etc. She is the editor of Czech Plays (Nick Hern Books, 1992) and the author of The Velvet Philosophers (Claridge Press, 1999) and Trial by Theatre: Reports on Czech Drama (Karolinum Press, 2019). [She was awarded the Commemorative Medal of President Václav Havel in 1998 and the M.B.E. (for services to UK-Czech Republic cultural relations) in 2002.]