Joanna Bourke is Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also the Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College. Bourke is the Principal Investigator of an interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled ‘SHaME’ (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters, which explores medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence).

Joanna’s first book was “From Husbandry to Housewifery, a history of female labour in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century”. After writing a book on the British working classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (“Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1860-1960”), her interests turned to the experiences of men and women in wartime. After a number of books on the cultural history of modern warfare (including “Dismembering the Male” and “An Intimate History of Killing”), she turned to the history of the emotions (especially fear: a book entitled “Fear: A Cultural History”) and to the history of rape (“Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present”).

In 2022, her book 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People was published, as part of the commemoration of Birkbeck’s bicentenary.