Work
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...
Masculinity and the German First World War Experience: A Secret HistoryReview 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...
Sparta's German Children: The ideal of ancient Sparta in the Royal Prussian Cadet-Corps, 1818-1920, and in National Socialist elite schools (the Napolas), 1933-1945Buy this itemSwansea (Classical Press of Wales), 2013.
From the eighteenth century until 1945, German children were taught to model themselves on the young of an Ancient Greek city-state: Sparta. From older children, from teachers in the classroom, and from higher authority first in Prussia, then in Imperial and National Socialist Germany, came images of Sparta designed to inculcate ideals of endurance, discipline and of military self-sacrifice. In treating the final period of this process, the author has collected testimony from numerous surviving German witnesses who attended the Napolas as children in the early 1940s. Read more...
Presented at an international conference entitled Writing Ancient History in the Interwar Period (1918-1939), Newcastle University, 24 January 2020.Read more...
'Mussolini's Third Rome, Hitler's Third Reich and the Allure of Antiquity: Classicizing Chronopolitics as a Remedy for Unstable National Identity?'Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 8 (2), 2019, pp. 127-52.
While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.Read more...
Presented at an international conference entitled Classics and the Spectacular under Fascism: Classical Performance in the ‘Ventennio Fascista, Ioannou Centre, University of Oxford, 16 December 2019.Read more...
'Die Klosterschule Ilfeld als Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt'in Die Klosterkammer Hannover 1931-1955: Eine Mittelbehörde zwischen wirtschaftlicher Rationalität und Politisierung, ed. Detlef Schmiechen Ackermann et al., Göttingen (Wallstein), 2018, pp. 605-26.
This chapter delineates the history of the Klosterschule in Ilfeld, and its transformation into a Nationalpolitische Erziehungsanstalt (Napola). The Klosterkammer Hannover's role in the running of the school and its support of the Napola after 1935 is explored, as well as its involvement with other putative Napola foundation projects.Read more...
Presented at an international conference entitled Is Europe Inclusive? Politics, Discourses and Practices, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, 14 November 2019.Read more...