/ 2023

Year: 2023

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...

Christopherson-Knott Fellowship at Durham's Institute of Advanced Study

In 2023-2024, Helen has been appointed as a Christopherson-Knott Foundation Fellow at Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, leading a Major Interdisciplinary Research Project as part of the Institute's programme for the academic year.Read more...

'The Third Reich's Elite Schools' Now Out in Paperback

Helen's monograph The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has now been released in an affordable paperback edition. To purchase a copy, you can visit the Oxford University Press website here.Read more...

Interview with Interview with 'The Press Project'

Helen has recently been interviewed by Konstantinos Poulis of 'The Press Project', a news organisation based in Athens. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.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...

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...

Critical Acclaim for Critical Acclaim for 'The Third Reich's Elite Schools'

Thus far, Helen's second book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has received critical acclaim in ten different periodicals, ranging from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Historical Studies in Education.Read more...

New Article: New Article: 'The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich's "Special Schools" and "Elite Schools"'

Helen's latest article, in collaboration with Lisa Pine, has now been published in The Historical Journal.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’, to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the Napolas.Read more...

New Publications on Testimonies and Nazi Boarding SchoolsNew Publications on Testimonies and Nazi Boarding Schools

Two of Helen's essays have recently been published in edited collections from Palgrave Macmillan: 'Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System', in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jenz, and (with Achim Saupe) 'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History', in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, edited by Sara Jones and Roger Woods.Read more...

'The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich's "Special Schools" and "Elite Schools"'

The Historical Journal 66 (2), 2023, pp. 413-34.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes.Read more...