Author: Helen Roche

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...

Ricerche Storiche LIII (3), 2023, 105-130 (co-written with Dario Pasquini).

Anti-Italian stereotypes proved central to the defence strategy of German war criminals, such as Albert Kesselring, who were tried in the early post-war period for war-crimes committed in Italy. This article identifies a number of recurring tropes which repeatedly come to the fore in accounts given by Kesselring and other German generals and officers who fought in the Mediterranean theatre, both in the testimonies given during Kesselring’s trial, and in later memoirs.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...

This year saw numerous media reports and broadcasts surrounding the publication of Helen's second book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, in November 2021. Subsequent presentations included a guest lecture to pupils at Brentwood School and an in-person book-launch at Durham Castle. Helen's work on 'Sparta and the Nazis' was featured on The Ancients, a History Hit podcast, while her research on everyday life under Nazism was featured in four episodes of the Real Dictators podcast series on Hitler. Helen also contributed two articles entitled ‘Founding of the Napolas in Austria’ and ‘Bundeserziehungsanstalten / Staatserziehungsanstalten' to the online Encyclopedia of Contemporary Austrian History.Read more...

Helen recently contributed a podcast on ‘Classics in Nazi Germany’ to a series of podcasts on Classics and decolonisation hosted by Khameleon Productions.

The series, entitled ‘Interrogating Classics’, forms part of Khameleon’s commitment to exploring new narratives, platforming untold stories, and discovering fresh outlooks through interdisciplinary forms.Read more...

In 2023-2024, Helen has been appointed as a Christopherson-Knott Foundation Fellow at Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study, leading a Major Interdisciplinary Research Project as part of the Institute's programme for the academic year.Read more...

Helen's monograph The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has now been released in an affordable paperback edition. To purchase a copy, you can visit the Oxford University Press website here.Read more...