Author: Helen Roche
Helen's review of Paul Fox's The Image of the Soldier in German Military Culture, 1871-1933 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), has just been published in Central European History journal.Read more...
Public lecture, given on zoom as part of the Gala Theatre's 'History Now' lecture series, Durham, 23 November 2020.Read more...
Zoom presentation, given to upper-level history pupils at St Andrew's School, Delaware, 21 April 2020.Read more...
Helen has recently been nominated for the Philip Leverhulme Prize in History.
The prizes are awarded by the Leverhulme Trust to researchers at an early stage of their careers whose work has had international impact, and whose future research career is deemed to be exceptionally promising.Read more...
Masculinity and the German First World War Experience: A Secret HistoryReview of Jason Crouthamel's An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Reviews in History.
In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay's first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces:Read more...
Sparta's German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945Buy this itemSwansea (Classical Press of Wales), 2013.
From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. In treating the final period of this process, the author has collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. Read more...
Presented at an international conference entitled Writing Ancient History in the Interwar Period (1918-1939), Newcastle University, 24 January 2020.Read more...
On 30 July 2020, Helen joined Professor Stephen Hodkinson and Dr Philip Davies of the University of Nottingham for a live discussion of Sparta’s legacy in modern politics, part of a series entitled ‘Sparta Live!’, which is being broadcast to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae.Read more...
New Publication: Forgetting in the History of the HumanitiesHelen’s article, ‘Eine Vergangenheit, die lieber vergessen wird? Scholarly Habitus-Forming, Professional Amnesia, and Postwar Engagement with Nazi Classical Scholarship’ has just been published in History of the Humanities journal, as part of a special issue on ‘Forgetting in the History of the Humanities’, edited by Han Lamers and Toon van Hal.
Helen's brief article took Volker Losemann’s recently published collection of essays, entitled Clio und die Nationalsozialisten, as a starting point.Read more...
On 15 May 2020, Helen’s podcast on ‘The Impact of Historical Philhellenism on Germany’s View of the Greek Crisis’, first presented in March 2016, was featured at the University of Oxford’s Modern Greek Virtual Seminar.Read more...