Work

Review of Chiara Bonacchi, Heritage and Nationalism: Understanding Populism through Big Data (London: UCL Press, 2022), Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 30 (3), September 2024, 837-8.

The politicization of the past has long been a key concern for archaeologists, historians, and heritage professionals. However, with the recent advent of social media, new opportunities to research the resonance of distant pasts in populist rhetoric now abound – if such sources can be harnessed appropriately.Read more...

Invited paper, presented at a workshop on 'Forgotten Voices', Institut für Geschichtsdidaktik und Public History, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 26 September 2024.Read more...

Invited presentation, presented jointly with Alan Fentiman (film-maker) and Alex Chisholm-Loxley (composer), at a workshop on 'Forgotten Voices', Institut für Geschichtsdidaktik und Public History, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, 25 September 2024.Read more...

Guest lecture, presented at the Institute of History, University of San Sebastián, Santiago de Chile, 22 August 2024.Read more...

Presented at an international online workshop on 'Politicised Nostalgias', University of Northampton, 12 July 2024.Read more...

The rise in visibility of the global far right over the last ten years has led to many scholarly discussions of how extremist narratives are formulated and circulated. This project aimed to interrogate one particular strand within such right-wing narratives: the use of ancient Greece and Rome – a topic which has not yet received comprehensive investigation. In taking on this important and deeply unsettling form of classical reception, we also sought to examine how disciplinary structures have themselves been complicit in producing and reproducing politicised narratives about the ancient world.Read more...

Helen's third monograph, The Allure of Fascism: Why Interwar Europe Thought that Fascism was the Future, 1919-1939, is under contract with trade publisher Head of Zeus.

Aimed at a popular audience, the book will explore diaries and other egodocuments from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, seeking to understand why ordinary people were attracted to fascism as an ideology, a political system, and a way of life.Read more...

European History Quarterly 54 (2), 2024, 258-275 (Special Issue: The Cultural Axis between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany).

This article examines a series of trips to Fascist Italy that were undertaken by pupils of Nazi elite-schools in their role as youth ambassadors of the Third Reich. As a form of cultural diplomacy that continued during the Second World War, these trips were part of Fascist and Nazi efforts to foster a new cultural order. Although intended to strengthen ties between the two regimes, the trips also laid bare national differences.Read more...

Ricerche Storiche LIII (3), 2023, 105-130 (co-written with Dario Pasquini).

Anti-Italian stereotypes proved central to the defence strategy of German war criminals, such as Albert Kesselring, who were tried in the early post-war period for war-crimes committed in Italy. This article identifies a number of recurring tropes which repeatedly come to the fore in accounts given by Kesselring and other German generals and officers who fought in the Mediterranean theatre, both in the testimonies given during Kesselring’s trial, and in later memoirs.Read more...

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...