Joanna Bourke


Joanna Bourke is a British historian and academic. She is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.

Biography

Born to Christian medical-missionary parents, Bourke was brought up in New Zealand, Zambia, Solomon Islands and Haiti. She attended the University of Auckland, gaining a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in History. She undertook her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Australian National University and subsequently held academic posts at the ANU, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London. Her primary affiliation is with Birkbeck, University of London, but she is also Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, and the Global Innovation Chair in the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has joint British and New Zealand citizenship.
Bourke, who describes herself as a "socialist feminist", has published 13 books and over 100 articles in academic journals or edited collections. Her books include ones on British, Irish, American, Australia, and Haitian history from the late eighteenth century to the present. They focus on topics such as women's history, gender, working-class culture, war and masculinity, the cultural history of fear, the history of rape, war art, pain, militarisation, the history of what it means to be human, and animal-human relations. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek. An Intimate History of Killing won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize. It was in the final shortlist for the W. H. Smith Literary Prize.
Bourke is a frequent contributor to television and radio, a blogger and tweeter, and a regular correspondent for newspapers and popular journals. Her 40-CD audio history of Britain, entitled "Eyewitness", won Gold for Best Audio Production for Volume 1910–19, Gold for Best Audio Production for Volume 1940–49, and Gold for the Most Original Audio for all 10 volumes.
Bourke lives in London. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. She is the Principal Investigator for a Wellcome Trust project called SHaME, or Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters, which explores the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence. The project aims to move beyond shame to address this global health crisis. SHaME is an interdisciplinary research project, with PhD scholars, post-doctoral researchers, a film-maker, visiting fellows and professors, and a public engagement and events organiser. SHaME spans both historical and contemporary, regional and global perspectives. It is committed to research and activism involving minoritised communities. As part of this project Bourke is writing one book on the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence in the United Kingdom, United States, Ireland, and Australasia, followed by another on the global history of sexual violence.

Selected works

  • Husbandry and Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914, Oxford University Press, 1993
  • Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity, Routledge, 1994
  • Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War, Reaktion Press and University of Chicago Press, 1996
  • An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare, Granta, 1999, Eyewitness, Authentic Voices of the 20th Century, BBC Audiobooks, 2004
  • Fear: A Cultural History, Virago, 2006
  • Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present, Virago, 2007
  • What It Means To Be Human. Historical Reflections 1790 to the Present, Virago, 2011
  • The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, Oxford University Press, 2014
  • Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade our Lives, Virago, 2014 War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, Reaktion Books, 2017 Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love, TJ Books, 2020 Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence, Reaktion Books Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People, Oxford University Press, 2022