/ Work

Work

Outreach in 2021-22Outreach in 2021-22

This year saw numerous media reports and broadcasts surrounding the publication of Helen's second book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, in November 2021. Subsequent presentations included a guest lecture to pupils at Brentwood School and an in-person book-launch at Durham Castle. Helen's work on 'Sparta and the Nazis' was featured on The Ancients, a History Hit podcast, while her research on everyday life under Nazism was featured in four episodes of the Real Dictators podcast series on Hitler. Helen also contributed two articles entitled ‘Founding of the Napolas in Austria’ and ‘Bundeserziehungsanstalten / Staatserziehungsanstalten' to the online Encyclopedia of Contemporary Austrian History.Read more...

Khameleon Classics PodcastKhameleon Classics Podcast

Helen recently contributed a podcast on ‘Classics in Nazi Germany’ to a series of podcasts on Classics and decolonisation hosted by Khameleon Productions.

The series, entitled ‘Interrogating Classics’, forms part of Khameleon’s commitment to exploring new narratives, platforming untold stories, and discovering fresh outlooks through interdisciplinary forms.Read more...

Outreach in 2019-2020Outreach in 2019-2020

During 2019-2020, the world moved from some semblance of 'normality' to a totally online world, with workshops, public lectures and seminars all being held in virtual form. Engagements with the general public during the year included contributing a lecture in German on Nazi elite-school exchange programmes with British public schools to the 11th public-facing scholarly symposium at the Wewelsburg, alongside historians Mary Fulbrook, Caroline Pearce and Helen Boak.Read more...

Review of Review of 'Nazis and Nobles' by Stephan Malinowski

Review of Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance, by Stephan Malinowski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), in the American Historical Review 127 (4), December 2022, pp. 1942–1943.

The relationship between Nazism and the German aristocracy tends to be drawn in one of two ways, each verging on caricature – lionisation of the heroic, noble resistance fighters behind the July bomb plot, or caustic castigation of the be-monocled Junkers and the Cabinet of Barons who smoothed Hitler’s road to power.Read more...

Review of Review of 'German Catholicism at War' by Thomas Brodie

Review of Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at War 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), History. The Journal of the Historical Association 107, Issue 374, January 2022, pp. 184-6.

Thomas Brodie’s engaging and eminently readable study of German Catholicism during the Second World War represents both a tour de force of highly original and meticulous scholarship, and an exceptional work of Alltagsgeschichte. Brodie provides his readers with a fully nuanced account of Catholic reactions to war and genocide.Read more...

'Inhumane propaganda, humanely analysed?'

Review of David B. Dennis' Inhumanities. Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in Reviews in History.

For the past few years, David B. Dennis has had the unenviable task of steeping himself in the (turgid, yet strangely compelling) prose of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s major propaganda organ, and the Third Reich’s daily paper of choice. The result is a synoptic compendium of National Socialist thought on major cultural and artistic figures, which is both chilling in the delusion it reveals, and startling in its originality.Read more...

Abusing Antiquity? Conceptual, Methodological and Ethical Reflections on Researching Classics and the Alt-Right

Presented at an international interdisciplinary symposium on Abusing Antiquity?, St Aidan’s College, University of Durham, 14 November 2023.Read more...

Imperial Decline and Fall in National Socialist Racial Ideology

Presented as part of a virtual lecture series for Ukrainian students entitled 'Empire, War, Identities: Ancient Lessons for the Present Day', 13 June 2022.Read more...

Perceptions of Decadence in the Context of Interwar Fascist Regimes

Presented at a virtual workshop on 'The Politics of Decadence', International Institute for Cultural Enquiry, University of Exeter, 16 May 2022.Read more...

Book launch presentation: The Third Reich's Elite Schools

Guest lecture, presented at University College, Durham, 14 March 2022.Read more...