Joanna Bourke

Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy.

She is the Principal Investigator for an interdisciplinary Wellcome-Trust project called SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters: shame.bbk.ac.uk), which explores medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence. In the past few years, her research has also focused on questions of humanity, militarisation, and pain. Her books have ranged from the social and economic history of Ireland, to social histories of the British working classes, to cultural histories of military conflict between 1830s to the present. She has worked on the history of the emotions, particularly fear and hatred, and the history of sexual violence. Most recently, she is the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers and War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict.