Work
Public lecture, given at the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, London, 24 May 2013.Read more...
Greek Debts: Literal and Symbolic; Ancient and ModernReview of Johanna Hanink's The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), in Reviews in History.
At the height of the Greek financial crisis, reports from colleagues based in Athens painted a sorry picture of citizens who had fallen upon hard times desperately rummaging in dustbins to supplement their dwindling larders. The statistics told an even grimmer story – between 2010 and 2011, suicide rates in Greece rose by 40 per cent.Read more...
Presented at Declines and Falls: Perspectives in European History and Historiography - Twenty Years of the European Review of History / Revue européenne d'histoire - An Anniversary Conference, Central European University, Budapest, 17 May 2013.Read more...
Presented at the Classical Association Conference 2013, University of Reading, 5 April 2013.Read more...
Presented at an international conference on Anglo-German Perceptions and Prejudices since 1800, University of Cambridge, 21-22 March 2013.Read more...
Outreach project at Soham Village CollegeOn 20 March 2013, Helen gave a talk, entitled 'Sparta: Myth and Reality' to GCSE students at Soham Village College, a specialist Technology and Languages College which gained Academy status in 2011. This was the very first meeting of the school's new Classics society, 'Plato's People'. The History GCSE classes also attended, which gave the discussion afterwards an extra piquancy - particularly since Spartan reception in Nazi Germany was one of the themes. The event was organised in collaboration with the Cambridge University Museums outreach initiative, led by Rachel Sinfield, as well as Bessie Owen and Jon Stenner, the Classics teachers at Soham VC.Read more...
Review of 'The "New Man" in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945'Review of The “New Man” in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919-1945, ed. Jorge Dagnino, Matthew Feldman, and Paul Stocker (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), published in Reviews in History, review no. 2386, April 2020.
During the interwar period, the figure of the ‘New Man’ constituted a powerful symbol of the promise and potential of a thorough-going political and anthropological revitalisation of society, which could effectively counteract widely-perceived notions of crisis and decline in the aftermath of the Great War.Read more...
Review of 'The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich'Review of The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich, ed. Robert Gelatelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 104, Issue 362, October 2019, 783-5.
With the editorship of a new illustrated history of the Third Reich aimed at a popular readership comes both great responsibility and great opportunity – a challenge to which Robert Gellately, one of those historians who has done most to shape the historiography of Nazi Germany recently, has risen with aplomb.Read more...
On 11th November 2011, Helen was interviewed by Dr. Jessica Hughes of Classics Confidential, the Open University’s vodcasting site for Classical ‘news, gossip and curiosities’.Read more...
Review of Martin Gutmann, 'Building a Nazi Europe'Review of Building a Nazi Europe: The SS's Germanic Volunteers by Martin Gutmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), in History: The Journal of the Historical Association 106, Issue 369, December 2020, pp. 143-5.
Martin R. Gutmann’s monograph lucidly demonstrates that nationality need be no bar to conniving in atrocity, or the will to participate in Nazism’s violent and genocidal vision for a new Europe.Read more...