/ 2023 - Page 2

Year: 2023

'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...

'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History'

in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023, pp. 65-90 (co-written with Achim Saupe).

This chapter gives an overview of the ways in which testimony has been used by historians, and the ways in which it has influenced the development of new historiographical methods. Above all, the authors explore the different contextual frameworks within which testimonies have developed—legal, moral, and practical. What makes a testimony ‘true’ or ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the observer?Read more...

Outreach in 2017-2018Outreach in 2017-2018

From September 2018 onwards, Helen collaborated with 72 Films as a consultant to two TV series on Nazi Germany, commissioned by the BBC (the first series, Rise of the Nazis, was screened on BBC 2 in 2019; the second, Dictators at War, was screened in February 2022).

Helen's work was also featured in two newspapers, Italian broadsheet Il Manifesto, which featured a full-page spread on the Brill Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on 11 February 2018 (pictured), and the Indian Sunday Guardian, which published an article on 2 June 2018 entitled 'Childhood was Given a New Meaning in European Schools’, featuring Sparta's German Children.Read more...

Outreach in 2015-16Outreach in 2015-16

In addition to media surrounding her lecture in Nordhausen, Helen was interviewed by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Cambridge News, and the Leipziger Volkszeitung (pictured) about her research on the Napolas. You can read the interview with Georgios Chatzoudis on the L.I.S.A. academic portal of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung here.

In addition, with Dr. Katharina Karcher, Helen co-organised a public film-screening and panel discussion, featuring Andreas Veiel’s Der Kick (2006), as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on 30 October 2015. The event was featured in the Festival of Ideas Speaker Spotlight Series, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, and on the Cambridge University website.Read more...