Work
'Inhumane propaganda, humanely analysed?'Review of David B. Dennis' Inhumanities. Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), in Reviews in History.
For the past few years, David B. Dennis has had the unenviable task of steeping himself in the (turgid, yet strangely compelling) prose of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party’s major propaganda organ, and the Third Reich’s daily paper of choice. The result is a synoptic compendium of National Socialist thought on major cultural and artistic figures, which is both chilling in the delusion it reveals, and startling in its originality.Read more...
Presented at an international interdisciplinary symposium on Abusing Antiquity?, St Aidan’s College, University of Durham, 14 November 2023.Read more...
Presented as part of a virtual lecture series for Ukrainian students entitled 'Empire, War, Identities: Ancient Lessons for the Present Day', 13 June 2022.Read more...
Presented at a virtual workshop on 'The Politics of Decadence', International Institute for Cultural Enquiry, University of Exeter, 16 May 2022.Read more...
Guest lecture, presented at University College, Durham, 14 March 2022.Read more...
'The Biopolitics of Education in the Third Reich's "Special Schools" and "Elite Schools"'The Historical Journal 66 (2), 2023, pp. 413-34.
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’ (Hilfsschulen), to the ‘positive’ biological selection of elite-school applicants at the National Political Education Institutes.Read more...
'Testimonies in Historiography and Oral History'in The Palgrave Handbook of Testimony and Culture, ed. Sara Jones, Roger Woods, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2023, pp. 65-90 (co-written with Achim Saupe).
This chapter gives an overview of the ways in which testimony has been used by historians, and the ways in which it has influenced the development of new historiographical methods. Above all, the authors explore the different contextual frameworks within which testimonies have developed—legal, moral, and practical. What makes a testimony ‘true’ or ‘trustworthy’ in the eyes of the observer?Read more...
'Nazi Elite Boarding Schools and the Attempted Creation of a New Class System'in Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jenz, Basingstoke (Palgrave Macmillan), 2022, pp. 79-100.
This article uses the elite education provided by the Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalten (Napolas) as a case study of the Nazi regime’s drive to eradicate class-based social differences. Nazi propaganda claimed that the Napolas embodied the most ‘socialist’ elements of National Socialism, and that they were instrumental in realising the Nazi ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft.Read more...
From Humboldt to Hitler? The Third Reich's Education Ministry RevealedReview of Anne C. Nagel's Hitlers Bildungsreformer. Das Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung 1934-1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2012), in Reviews in History.
What's in a name? Often, particularly with books marketed at a more popular audience, all too much seems to be at stake - the controversy caused by Paul Preston's The Spanish Holocaust being a recent case in point. Thus far, criticism of Anne C. Nagel's 2012 volume, Hitlers Bildungsreformer, has followed similar lines.Read more...
Invited lecture, given via zoom to pupils at Brentwood School, 20 January 2022.Read more...