Important

On 7 May 2025, the exhibition on which Helen has been collaborating with Brandenburg's State Centre for Civic Education (Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung) officially opened. The exhibition, which runs until 8 October, explores the history of the Napola in Potsdam, current site of the Brandenburg State Government, and draws extensively on Helen's research.Read more...

Helen has just been appointed as co-Editor-in-Chief of Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. Having moved from Brill, the journal is being relaunched by Central European University Press, an imprint of Amsterdam University Press.Read more...

Helen recently contributed to the latest series of the podcast 'Real Dictators', featuring the life and times of Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. You can listen to the series on BBC Sounds here.Read more...

Helen and Dr. Ladan Cockshut have just been awarded Research Development funding from Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study for a project which will bring together academic historians and game developers to see what each group can learn from the other.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...

Helen has recently published two new articles in the leading historical journals Ricerche Storiche and European History Quarterly; 'Italiani Cattiva Gente? Anti-Italian Stereotypes and the Obfuscation of War Crimes in German Perpetrator Narratives from the Italian Theatre of War' (with Dario Pasquini), and 'Nazi Elite-School Pupils as Youth Ambassadors Between Fascist Italy and the Third Reich'.Read more...

Helen's monograph The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas has now been released in an affordable paperback edition. To purchase a copy, you can visit the Oxford University Press website here.Read more...

Helen has recently been interviewed by Konstantinos Poulis of 'The Press Project', a news organisation based in Athens. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.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...