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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


‘Rachel Comforted’: Spiritualism and the Reconstruction of the Body after Death
Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...
Feb 10, 202418 min read
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Eric Hobsbawm (with a nod to poetic genius Adrienne Rich!)
What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...
Feb 10, 20246 min read
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Sleep: A History
Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...
Feb 10, 20248 min read
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The Humanities: La Fontaine's Cat, Kafka's Ape, and the Human
What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an anti...
Feb 6, 202413 min read
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Rape (a very very short history)
We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...
Feb 6, 20244 min read
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Human Rights: Are They Universal?
God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...
Feb 6, 202412 min read
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World War One: The Home Front
Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...
Feb 6, 20248 min read
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Mastectomy, Fear, the Body: A History
In August 1812, eminent novelist Frances Burney described with alarming precision her mounting sense of terror as she prepared to undergo...
Feb 6, 20247 min read
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Cruelty: Pain, War, Sexual Abuse
The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...
Feb 6, 202421 min read
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Marianne Elliott: Inspirations Series
Marianne Elliott is one of the greatest living historians of Ireland, with books that have changed the way we think about revolution and...
Feb 6, 20246 min read
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Helena Kennedy: Inspirations Series
Kennedy’s great passion is for law. She was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1972. At the age of only 24 years, just out of pupillage,...
Feb 6, 20245 min read
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Judith Butler: Inspirations Series
Judith Pamela Butler is the most widely read philosopher on the planet and the most influential voice in contemporary gender theory....
Feb 6, 20245 min read
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Jude Kelly: Inspirations Series
Jude Kelly is known to millions of people around the world. She is a theatre director, with more than 100 productions to her name....
Feb 6, 20246 min read
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Marai Larasi: Inspirations Series
‘If we are to end violence against women and girls, we need to create seismic shifts across our social norms’. So says Marai Larasi,...
Feb 6, 20245 min read
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Mechanics' Institutes: What? Why? Where?
When Birkbeck was established in 1823, it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution. It was one of the first ‘mechanics’ institutes’...
Feb 6, 202414 min read
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Imkaan, Intersectionality, and Sexual Violence
On 4 March 2020, the Black feminist organisation Imkaan launched a report in the Houses of Parliament on sexual violence against...
Feb 5, 20243 min read
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Medical Professionals and Sexual Violence
On 12 June 1993, the editors of the British Medical Journal published an account by a male doctor of being sexually assaulted by another...
Feb 5, 20246 min read
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Domestic Violence and Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic is a stark reminder of human vulnerability. To be vulnerable (from the Latin ‘vulnus’, meaning ‘wound’) is to be...
Feb 5, 20244 min read
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Domestic Violence, Firearms, and Covid-19
Covid-19 exposed girls, women, and other minoritised groups to increased domestic violence. As has happened throughout the world, calls...
Feb 5, 20242 min read
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Rape Kits and the 'Technoscientific Witness of Rape'
Andrea Quinlan’s 2017 book The Technoscientific Witness of Rape: Contentious Histories of Law, Feminism, and Forensic Science ...
Feb 5, 20242 min read
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