Outreach

This year saw numerous media reports and broadcasts surrounding the publication of Helen's second book, The Third Reich's Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas, in November 2021. Subsequent presentations included a guest lecture to pupils at Brentwood School and an in-person book-launch at Durham Castle. Helen's work on 'Sparta and the Nazis' was featured on The Ancients, a History Hit podcast, while her research on everyday life under Nazism was featured in four episodes of the Real Dictators podcast series on Hitler. Helen also contributed two articles entitled ‘Founding of the Napolas in Austria’ and ‘Bundeserziehungsanstalten / Staatserziehungsanstalten' to the online Encyclopedia of Contemporary Austrian History.Read more...

Helen recently contributed a podcast on ‘Classics in Nazi Germany’ to a series of podcasts on Classics and decolonisation hosted by Khameleon Productions.

The series, entitled ‘Interrogating Classics’, forms part of Khameleon’s commitment to exploring new narratives, platforming untold stories, and discovering fresh outlooks through interdisciplinary forms.Read more...

During 2019-2020, the world moved from some semblance of 'normality' to a totally online world, with workshops, public lectures and seminars all being held in virtual form. Engagements with the general public during the year included contributing a lecture in German on Nazi elite-school exchange programmes with British public schools to the 11th public-facing scholarly symposium at the Wewelsburg, alongside historians Mary Fulbrook, Caroline Pearce and Helen Boak.Read more...

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...

On 24 October 2016, Helen gave a public lecture at Nordhausen's Museum Tabakspeicher, entitled 'Napola Ilfeld and other Nazi Elite Schools in Central Germany', organised by Town Archivist Dr. Wolfram Theilemann, in conjunction with the Nordhausen Society for History and Antiquity. The lecture also attracted attention in the local media.Read more...

In addition to media surrounding her lecture in Nordhausen, Helen was interviewed by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Cambridge News, and the Leipziger Volkszeitung (pictured) about her research on the Napolas. You can read the interview with Georgios Chatzoudis on the L.I.S.A. academic portal of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung here.

In addition, with Dr. Katharina Karcher, Helen co-organised a public film-screening and panel discussion, featuring Andreas Veiel’s Der Kick (2006), as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on 30 October 2015. The event was featured in the Festival of Ideas Speaker Spotlight Series, on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, and on the Cambridge University website.Read more...

An essay on Hitler's foreign policy, commissioned by Hodder Education, has now appeared in the publisher's new Edexcel-approved A-level textbook, entitled History+ for Edexcel A Level: Nationalism, dictatorship and democracy in twentieth-century Europe.

The textbook, edited by Peter Clements, Robin Bunce, Sarah Ward, Mark Gosling, and Andrew Flint, is intended to encourage students to develop high-level skills in historical studies by providing a stimulating mixture of expert narrative and extended reading, including bespoke essays from leading academics.Read more...

On 7 July 2015, Helen gave a lunchtime lecture to the Rotary Club of Cambridge, entitled 'Nazis at the Leys: British public school exchange programmes with the Third Reich'. The lecture explored the exchanges which took place between the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas) and a number of British public schools during the 1930s, including The Leys School in Cambridge.

The talk was one in a series of general-interest lectures hosted by the Club throughout the year, and was well attended by local Rotarians.Read more...

From 27th September 2014 to 18th January 2015, a selection of editions from Helen's comprehensive collection of Prussian cadet-school literature were recently displayed as part of an exhibition at Durham University's Palace Green Library, entitled 'Books for Boys: Heroism, Adventure and Empire at the Dawn of the First World War'.Read more...