Author: Helen Roche

Review of David B. Dennis' Inhumanities. Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in Reviews in History.

For the past few years, David B. Dennis has had the unenviable task of steeping himself in the (turgid, yet strangely compelling) prose of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s major propaganda organ, and the Third Reich’s daily paper of choice. The result is a synoptic compendium of National Socialist thought on major cultural and artistic figures, which is both chilling in the delusion it reveals, and startling in its originality.Read more...

Keynote paper, presented at an international interdisciplinary symposium on Abusing Antiquity?, St Aidan’s College, University of Durham, 14 November 2023.Read more...

Presented as part of a virtual lecture series for Ukrainian students entitled 'Empire, War, Identities: Ancient Lessons for the Present Day', 13 June 2022.Read more...

Presented at a virtual workshop on 'The Politics of Decadence', International Institute for Cultural Enquiry, University of Exeter, 16 May 2022.Read more...

Guest lecture, presented at University College, Durham, 14 March 2022.Read more...

Thus far, Helen's second book The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has received critical acclaim in ten different periodicals, ranging from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Historical Studies in Education.Read more...

Helen's latest article, in collaboration with Lisa Pine, has now been published in The Historical Journal.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’, to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the Napolas.Read more...

Two of Helen's essays have recently been published in edited collections from Palgrave Macmillan: 'Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System', in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Daniel Gerster and Felicity Jenz, and (with Achim Saupe) 'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History', in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, edited by Sara Jones and Roger Woods.Read more...

The Historical Journal 66 (2), 2023, pp. 413-34.

This article draws attention to education as a previously under-researched category of intervention in the history of modern biopolitics. The two case-studies cover both extremes of the spectrum of biological selection in education, from the negative, eugenic policies applied to supposedly ‘abnormal’ pupils at the so-called ‘special schools’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes.Read more...

in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023, pp. 65-90 (co-written with Achim Saupe).

This chapter gives an overview of the ways in which testimony has been used by historians, and the ways in which it has influenced the development of new historiographical methods. Above all, the authors explore the different contextual frameworks within which testimonies have developed—legal, moral, and practical. What makes a testimony ‘true’ or ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the observer?Read more...