Year: 2024

Helen recently contributed to the latest series of the podcast 'Real Dictators', featuring the life and times of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. You can listen to the series on BBC Sounds here.Read more...

Despite the global importance of the gaming industry, and the centrality of video-games and contemporary boardgames as cultural artefacts in the modern world, historians beyond the sub-discipline of Historical Game Studies have often failed to consider games seriously as historical sources, while game-industry professionals do not necessarily consider explicit historical methodologies when designing games set in the past.Read more...

Helen and Dr. Ladan Cockshut have just been awarded Research Development funding from Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study for a project which will bring together academic historians and game developers to see what each group can learn from the other.Read more...

Review of T. Corey Brennan's The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome's Most Dangerous Political Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press), Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 32 (1), Spring/Summer 2024, 177-91.

The fasces—the bundled axes and rods which symbolized power and punishment in ancient Rome—have often exerted a powerful hold on the Western imagination, long before their adoption by Mussolini led to their co-option for the term “fascist”, with all of its stark, unsavory, and brutal political connotations.Read more...

Review of Chiara Bonacchi, Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (London: UCL Press, 2022), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 30 (3), September 2024, 837-8.

The politicization of the past has long been a key concern for archaeologists, historians, and heritage professionals. However, with the recent advent of social media, new opportunities to research the resonance of distant pasts in populist rhetoric now abound – if such sources can be harnessed appropriately.Read more...

Invited paper, presented at a workshop on 'Forgotten Voices', Institut für Geschichtsdidaktik und Public History, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 26 September 2024.Read more...

Invited presentation, presented jointly with Alan Fentiman (film-maker) and Alex Chisholm-Loxley (composer), at a workshop on 'Forgotten Voices', Institut für Geschichtsdidaktik und Public History, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 25 September 2024.Read more...

In September 2024, Helen was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).Read more...

Guest lecture, presented at the Institute of History, University of San Sebastián, Santiago de Chile, 22 August 2024.Read more...

Presented at an international online workshop on 'Politicised Nostalgias', University of Northampton, 12 July 2024.Read more...