Prof Joanna Bourke: Cultural History of Sexual Violence

Talking Research

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, where she has taught since 1992. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Over the years, her books have ranged from the social and economic history of Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to social histories of the British working classes between 1860 and 1960s, to cultural histories of military conflict between the Anglo-Boer war and the present. She has worked on the history of the emotions, particularly fear and hatred, and the history of sexual violence. In the past few years, her research has focussed on questions of humanity, militarisation, and pain. She wrote a book entitled What It Means to Be Human. In 2014, she published two books: Wounding the World. How Military Violence and War Games Invade Our World and The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. In this conversation, we spoke about her book Rape: A history From 1860 to the Present and general themes such as the fall in conviction rates, why we need to look at perpetrators, the importance of a survivor- centered definition of rape & more. https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Rape.html?id=e_EDAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y