Year: 2021

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...

Helen has recently been appointed to the editorial board of Durham University's History in Politics journal.Read more...

One of Helen's articles, entitled 'Classics and Education in the Third Reich: "Die Alten Sprachen" and the Nazification of Latin- and Greek-teaching in secondary schools', has recently been praised in Susan A. Curry's review of Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany (2018), which was published online in The Classical Journal:

Curry contends that "Every teacher of Classics should read Roche’s article. Posthaste."Read more...

Helen’s most recent edited volume, the Brill Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2018) has just received another extremely favourable review in The Classical Journal.

"As white supremacist groups and authoritarian governments continue to coopt a particular vision of antiquity to lend authority to their own ideologies, this Companion serves as an important reminder of just how destructive these uses of history can become..."Read more...

Research Introduction, presented virtually at the NETWoRC seminar, Northumbria University, 3 November 2020.Read more...

Presented at the History Department Research Seminar, Durham University, 20 October 2021.Read more...

Keynote presentation, presented virtually at the launch conference of the European Classical Reception Research Network, St. Andrews, 29 May 2021.Read more...

Oxford (Oxford University Press), 2021. Drawing on material from eighty archives in six different countries worldwide, as well as eyewitness testimonies from over 100 former pupils, this book presents the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich's most prominent elite schools, the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas / NPEA). The Napolas provided an all-encompassing National Socialist 'total education', featuring ideological indoctrination, premilitary training, and a packed programme of extracurricular activities.Read more...

Review of Building a Nazi Europe: The SS's Germanic Volunteers by Martin Gutmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 106, Issue 369, December 2020, pp. 143-5.

Martin R. Gutmann’s monograph lucidly demonstrates that nationality need be no bar to conniving in atrocity, or the will to participate in Nazism’s violent and genocidal vision for a new Europe.Read more...