Historian

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She defines herself as “socialist-feminist” and has covered a wide range of themes in her work: the history of the working class and women’s work; wartime experiences of men and women; a history of emotions, in particular fear and hate; the history of sexual violence and, most recently, the imposition of bodily pain.

Notable among her published works are:

• The Story of Pain, From Prayer to Painkillers (2014).
• What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (2011).
• Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2008).
• Fear: A Cultural History (2005).
• Fear and Anxiety: Writing about Emotion in Modern History (2003, article in History Workshop Journal, Oxford University Press).
• An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (1999).
• Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1999).
• Working Class Cultures in Britain, 1890-1960: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity (1994).

[Last update: December 2014]

Translation: Julie Wark.