Author: Helen Roche
'A (Partial) Encyclopedia of the Fasces'Review of T. Corey Brennan's The Fasces: A History of Ancient Rome's Most Dangerous Political Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 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 'Heritage and Nationalism' by Chiara BonacchiReview 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...
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...
IAS Major Project: 'Abusing Antiquity? Classics and the Contemporary Far Right'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 a trade monograph aimed at the general public. 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...