Author: Helen Roche

in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies ejournal, Issue 7 (2012), pp. 25-39.

This article examines the ways in which Ancient Spartan history and mores, and in particular the Spartan art of war, were often portrayed as providing useful precedents for the Prussian military. Commentators frequently saw the Officer-Corps as embodying a type of ‘new Sparta’ in Prussia, recreating a similarly militaristic and socially exclusive society in contemporary terms.Read more...

in Das antike Sparta, ed. Anton Powell, Vassiliki Pothou, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag), 2017, pp. 157-80. Based on an abridged version of the third and fourth chapters of the author's doctoral thesis, this article provides a useful summary of those findings which concern laconophilia in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps. The paper on which the article is based was first presented at a conference of the International Sparta Seminar which took place at Regensburg University in September 2009.Read more...

Helen’s article ‘"Spartanische Pimpfe": The Importance of Sparta in the Educational Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools’, has been published in Sparta in Modern Thought, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales).

For more information and to read an abstract, click here.

To read the University of Nottingham's press release, click here.Read more...

On 11th November 2011, Helen was interviewed by Dr. Jessica Hughes of Classics Confidential, the Open University’s vodcasting site for Classical ‘news, gossip and curiosities’.Read more...

is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at Durham University. Her second book, a history of the Napolas, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Her first book, 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), 1933-1945, was publishedRead more...