Author: Helen Roche

On 30 July 2020, Helen joined Professor Stephen Hodkinson and Dr Philip Davies of the University of Nottingham for a live discussion of Sparta’s legacy in modern politics, part of a series entitled ‘Sparta Live!’, which is being broadcast to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae.Read more...

Helen’s article, ‘Eine Vergangenheit, die lieber vergessen wird? Scholarly Habitus-Forming, Professional Amnesia, and Postwar Engagement with Nazi Classical Scholarship’ has just been published in History of the Humanities journal, as part of a special issue on ‘Forgetting in the History of the Humanities’, edited by Han Lamers and Toon van Hal.

Helen's brief article took Volker Losemann’s recently published collection of essays, entitled Clio und die Nationalsozialisten, as a starting point.Read more...

On 15 May 2020, Helen’s podcast on ‘The Impact of Historical Philhellenism on Germany’s View of the Greek Crisis’, first presented in March 2016, was featured at the University of Oxford’s Modern Greek Virtual Seminar.Read more...

Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 8 (2), 2019, pp. 127-52.

While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.Read more...

Helen’s review of The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, edited by Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), has just been published in Reviews in History, the Institute of Historical Research e-journal.Read more...

On 21 April 2020, Helen gave a zoom seminar presentation on Napola exchanges with U.S. academies to an upper-level history class at St Andrew's School, Delaware.Read more...

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

"In the last two decades, a growing number of monographs, articles and conference proceedings dedicated to the use and abuse of the classical past have seen the light. This volume is a welcome addition to that body of work and offers fresh perspectives on the (mis)appropriation of the classical past by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.Read more...

On 24 January 2020, Helen presented a paper entitled ‘Back to the Ancient Greek Future? Greek Antiquity as Paradigm in National Socialist Classical Education’ at an international conference on 'Writing Ancient History in the Interwar Period', Newcastle University.Read more...

Helen’s guest-edited special issue of Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, entitled ‘Fascist Antiquities and Materialities from the Interwar Era to the Present Day’, has just been published by Brill. The edition includes Helen's article, ‘Mussolini’s ‘Third Rome’, Hitler’s Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?’ This special issue is based on contributions to an interdisciplinary workshop which was held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on 8 June 2018.Read more...

Presented at an international conference entitled Classics and the Spectacular under Fascism: Classical Performance in the ‘Ventennio Fascista, Ioannou Centre, University of Oxford, 16 December 2019.Read more...