Month: March 2013

Review of Jason Crouthamel's An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Reviews in History

In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay's first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces:Read more...

Review of Damian Valdez, German Philhellenism: The Pathos of the Historical Imagination from Winckelmann to Goethe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40 (1), March 2017, pp. 138-9.

Damian Valdez’s monograph provides a keen dissection of the clashing currents of idealism and historicism which shaped German thought on ancient Greece during the eighteenth century, placing idealism – and particularly idealists such as Goethe, Herder, Schlegel and Winckelmann – squarely within their respective contexts.Read more...

Presented at the Classical Association Conference 2013, University of Reading, 5 April 2013.Read more...

Presented at an international conference on Anglo-German Perceptions and Prejudices since 1800, University of Cambridge, 21-22 March 2013.Read more...

On 22 March 2013, Helen presented a paper entitled 'Zwischen Freundschaft und Feindschaft: Exploring relationships between pupils at the Napolas and British public schoolboys' at an international conference on Anglo-German Perceptions and Prejudices since 1800, University of Cambridge.Read more...

On 20 March 2013, Helen gave a talk, entitled 'Sparta: Myth and Reality' to GCSE students at Soham Village College, a specialist Technology and Languages College which gained Academy status in 2011. This was the very first meeting of the school's new Classics society, 'Plato's People'. The History GCSE classes also attended, which gave the discussion afterwards an extra piquancy - particularly since Spartan reception in Nazi Germany was one of the themes. The event was organised in collaboration with the Cambridge University Museums outreach initiative, led by Rachel Sinfield, as well as Bessie Owen and Jon Stenner, the Classics teachers at Soham VC.Read more...

Review of Veterans and Weimar Political Culture, by Benjamin Ziemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in The English Historical Review 131 (553), December 2016, pp. 1569-71.

Views of the Weimar Republic as essentially anarchic, unloved and unmourned have been extensively questioned in recent scholarship. Still, popular pronouncements tend to perpetuate such impressions – witness one critic of a recent exhibition, who began with the statement that ‘Nobody in Germany liked the Weimar Republic’. Read more...

On 20 March 2013, Helen gave a talk to GCSE students at Soham Village College, a specialist Technology and Languages College which gained Academy status in 2011.Read more...

Review of Daniel M. Knight, History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Sheila Lecoeur, Mussolini’s Greek Island: Fascism and the Italian Occupation of Syros in World War II (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), in Reviews in History.

There were times during the resurgence of the economic crisis in 2015 when it seemed as if 'Greek-bashing' had become a pan-European pastime. In this fraught international context, Daniel Knight’s first monograph provides a salutary reminder of the human consequences of austerity.Read more...

On 11th November 2011, Helen was interviewed by Dr. Jessica Hughes of Classics Confidential, the Open University’s vodcasting site for Classical ‘news, gossip and curiosities’.Read more...