Work

Review of Moritz Föllmer's in Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society from Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

All too often, it is glibly assumed that the rise of individuality, the spirit of modernity, and the triumph of democracy must necessarily go hand in hand. Moritz Föllmer’s new monograph provides an important corrective to this frequently uninterrogated set of assumptions.Read more...

Review of Christian Ingrao's Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), published in the Book Reviews section of the Wiener Library Blog.

In 2006, a publishing sensation erupted in France with the publication of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, a novel which sought to recreate the motivation and incremental brutalisation of an intelligent, educated SS officer, as he becomes ever more damningly implicated in the horrors of the Holocaust.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...

Presented at the History Department Research Seminar, Durham University, 20 October 2021.Read more...

Keynote presentation, presented virtually at the launch conference of the European Classical Reception Research Network, St. Andrews, 29 May 2021.Read more...

Public lecture, given on zoom as part of the Gala Theatre's 'History Now' lecture series, Durham, 23 November 2020.Read more...

Zoom presentation, given to upper-level history pupils at St Andrew's School, Delaware, 21 April 2020.Read more...

Review of Jason Crouthamel's An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality, and German Soldiers in the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), in Reviews in History.

In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay's first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces:Read more...

Drawing on material from eighty archives in six different countries worldwide, as well as eyewitness testimonies from over 100 former pupils, this book presents the first comprehensive history of the Third Reich's most prominent elite schools, the National Political Education Institutes (Napolas / NPEA). The Napolas provided an all-encompassing National Socialist 'total education', featuring ideological indoctrination, premilitary training, and a packed programme of extracurricular activities.Read more...