Joanna Bourke

Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Bourke has covered a wide range of topics in her research, always from a historical perspective: the working classes and female labour; the experiences of men and women in wartime, on and off the battlefield; emotions, especially fear and hatred; sexual violence; bodily pain; and bestiality, zoophilia and their ethical limits, among others. Her notable books include Fear: A Cultural History, (Virago, 2006) as well as The Second World War: A People’s History (Oxford University Press, 2001), An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (Basic Books, 1999) and Rape: Sex, Violence, History (Counterpoint, 2007). Recently, she edited the collection of illustrated essays War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict (Reaktion Books, 2017) and published Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (Oxford University Press, 2022).