Author: Helen Roche
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...
The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the NapolasBuy this itemDrawing on material from eighty archives in six different countries worldwide, as well as eyewitness testimonies from over 100 former pupils, this book presents the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich's most prominent elite schools, the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas / NPEA). The Napolas provided an all-encompassing National Socialist 'total education', featuring ideological indoctrination, premilitary training, and a packed programme of extracurricular activities.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...
'Mussolini's Third Rome, Hitler's Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?'Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 8 (2), 2019, pp. 127-52.
While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.Read more...
Helen’s review of The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, edited by Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), has just been published in Reviews in History, the Institute of Historical Research e-journal.Read more...