Year: 2013

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 The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, ed. Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), published in Reviews in History, review no. 2386, April 2020.

During the interwar period, the figure of the ‘New Man’ constituted a powerful symbol of the promise and potential of a thorough-going political and anthropological revitalisation of society, which could effectively counteract widely-perceived notions of crisis and decline in the aftermath of the Great War.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 The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. Robert Gelatelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 104, Issue 362, October 2019, 783-5.

With the editorship of a new illustrated history of the Third Reich aimed at a popular readership comes both great responsibility and great opportunity – a challenge to which Robert Gellately, one of those historians who has done most to shape the historiography of Nazi Germany recently, has risen with aplomb.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...

Review of State-Building after Civil War, 1866-1935, by Jasper Heinzen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in German History 35 (3), September 2018, pp. 454-6.

Jasper Heinzen’s first monograph aims to reframe historical interpretations of ‘1866 and all that’, focusing on the ramifications of civil war within Germany, rather than privileging external conflicts with Italy and Austria. What consequences did enduring tensions between Prussian imperial and provincial particularist ambitions have for Germany's eventual stability?Read more...

On 16 March 2013, Helen presented a paper entitled  'Kadettengeschichten: Exploring the Prussian cadet-school story' at an international conference entitled 'Approaching War (Europe): Childhood, Culture and the First World War, 1880-1919', University of Newcastle.Read more...

Presented at Approaching War (Europe): Childhood, Culture and the First World War, 1880-1919, University of Newcastle, 16-17 March 2013.Read more...

Review of Klio und die Nationalsozialisten: Gesammelte Schriften zur Wissenschafts und Rezeptionsgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, 2017), published in The Classical Review 69 (2), October 2019, pp. 666-7.

Volker Losemann’s work has rightly been hailed as pioneering in its efforts to bring to light the ideological distortions and academic opportunism to which Classical and ancient historical scholarship were subjected during the Third Reich. Read more...