Joanna Bourke

Joanna Bourke FBA (born 1963) is an historian and academic. She is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London.

Biography

Born to Christian missionary parents, Bourke was brought up in New Zealand, Zambia, Solomon Islands and Haiti. She attended the University of Auckland, gaining a BA and Masters in History. She undertook her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) and subsequently held academic posts at ANU, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London.

Bourke, who describes herself as a "socialist feminist", has written on Irish history, gender history, working-class culture, war and masculinity, the cultural history of fear, the history of rape, the history of what it means to be human, pain, and of militarisation.

Bourke lives in London. She is the Director of the Birkbeck Trauma Project (formerly, the Birkbeck Pain Project). In 2014 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

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, (Won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for 1998 and the Wolfson Prize for Historical Writing in 2000)
• Eyewitness, Authentic Voices of the 20th Century, BBC Audiobooks, 2004
• Fear: A Cultural History, Virago, 2006 (published by Shoemaker and Hoard in the US)
• Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present, Virago, 2007 (published in the US as Rape: Sex, Violence, History, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007)
• What It Means To Be Human. Historical Reflections 1790 to the Present, Virago, 2011 (published by Counterpoint in the US)
• 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 (published in the US as Deep Violence: Military Violence, War Play, and the Social Life of Weapons, Counterpoint, 2015)