Year: 2024

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

In August 2024, Helen has been invited to lecture at the University of San Sebastián, Santiago, Chile, hosted by Associate Professor in Modern European History, Dr. Jorge Dagnino. Her featured work will focus on the use of classical antiquity by the Italian Fascist and German National Socialist regimes.Read more...

The rise in visibility of the global far right over the last ten years has led to many scholarly discussions of how extremist narratives are formulated and circulated. This project aimed to interrogate one particular strand within such right-wing narratives: the use of ancient Greece and Rome – a topic which has not yet received comprehensive investigation. In taking on this important and deeply unsettling form of classical reception, we also sought to examine how disciplinary structures have themselves been complicit in producing and reproducing politicised narratives about the ancient world.Read more...

Helen's third monograph, The Allure of Fascism: Why Interwar Europe Thought that Fascism was the Future, 1919-1939, is under contract with trade publisher Head of Zeus.

Aimed at a popular audience, the book will explore diaries and other egodocuments from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, seeking to understand why ordinary people were attracted to fascism as an ideology, a political system, and a way of life.Read more...

European History Quarterly 54 (2), 2024, 258-275 (Special Issue: The Cultural Axis between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany).

This article examines a series of trips to Fascist Italy that were undertaken by pupils of Nazi elite-schools in their role as youth ambassadors of the Third Reich. As a form of cultural diplomacy that continued during the Second World War, these trips were part of Fascist and Nazi efforts to foster a new cultural order. Although intended to strengthen ties between the two regimes, the trips also laid bare national differences.Read more...

Helen has recently published two new articles in the leading historical journals Ricerche Storiche and European History Quarterly; 'Italiani Cattiva Gente? Anti-Italian Stereotypes and the Obfuscation of War Crimes in German Perpetrator Narratives from the Italian Theatre of War' (with Dario Pasquini), and 'Nazi Elite-School Pupils as Youth Ambassadors Between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich'.Read more...

Review of Kim Beerden and Timo Epping (eds) Classical Controversies: Reception of Greco-Roman Antiquity in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2022), Journal of Anthropological Research 80 (1), 2024, 98-9.

Classics is often bedevilled by the need to assert its ‘relevance’ to the modern world. This timely and thought-provoking collection of essays demonstrates that the stakes of such ‘relevance’ can be all too high when the contemporary appropriations of antiquity in question often fuel extreme right-wing political agendas.Read more...