Author: Helen Roche

Since 2015, Helen has worked with Macat, an academic technology start-up which aims to develop critical thinking skills, as well as curating a library of analyses of the world's most influential intellectual works of non-fiction and works of scholarship. With a growing list of titles across a broad range of subject areas, Macat works with leading academics from the world’s top universities to produce new analyses that focus on the ideas and the impact of the most influential works ever written. Routledge has now published Helen's first two analyses in their Macat Library series of educational guides - Sir Ian Kershaw's The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich and Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.Read more...

From September 2018 onwards, Helen collaborated with 72 Films as a consultant to two TV series on Nazi Germany, commissioned by the BBC (the first series, Rise of the Nazis, was screened on BBC 2 in 2019; the second, Dictators at War, was screened in February 2022).

Helen's work was also featured in two newspapers, Italian broadsheet Il Manifesto, which featured a full-page spread on the Brill Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on 11 February 2018 (pictured), and the Indian Sunday Guardian, which published an article on 2 June 2018 entitled 'Childhood was Given a New Meaning in European Schools’, featuring Sparta's German Children.Read more...

Helen has recently been appointed to the editorial board of Durham University's History in Politics journal.Read more...

One of Helen's articles, entitled 'Classics and Education in the Third Reich: "Die Alten Sprachen" and the Nazification of Latin- and Greek-teaching in secondary schools', has recently been praised in Susan A. Curry's review of Brill's Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany (2018), which was published online in The Classical Journal:

Curry contends that "Every teacher of Classics should read Roche’s article. Posthaste."Read more...

Helen’s most recent edited volume, the Brill Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2018) has just received another extremely favourable review in The Classical Journal.

"As white supremacist groups and authoritarian governments continue to coopt a particular vision of antiquity to lend authority to their own ideologies, this Companion serves as an important reminder of just how destructive these uses of history can become..."Read more...

Helen has been selected as a finalist for the BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers Scheme 2021.
The scheme showcases early-career academics who can bring the best of university research and scholarly ideas to a broad audience through the media and public engagement.Read more...

Presented at the History Department Research Seminar, Durham University, 20 October 2021.Read more...

On 7 December 2020, Helen took part in a zoom panel discussion on 'Monuments and Memory', as part of the Gala Theatre's 'History Now' lecture series.Read more...

On 3 December 2020, Helen acted as a discussant for a postgraduate workshop organised by the Memory Studies Association's 'Memory and Populism' working group.Read more...

On 23 November 2020, Helen gave a public lecture on zoom as part of the Durham Gala Theatre's 'History Now' lecture series, entitled 'Nazi Elite-School Exchange Programmes with British Public Schools during the 1930s'.Read more...