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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


Lighten up! Make Coral Lace Tuiles.
Are you like me? Working on 'difficult' subjects? So.... Take care of yourself and your friends. Here is something more relaxing…. Try...
Mar 9, 20242 min read


Clare Shaw's Incredible Poems in 'Towards A General Theory of Love'
Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022) Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is...
Mar 7, 20245 min read


‘It Makes My Head Jump’: Shell-Shock, Psychology, and War 1914-1945
On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...
Feb 11, 202426 min read


The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action
William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...
Feb 11, 202419 min read


The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
Feb 11, 20247 min read


Lighten up! Blue Cheese Biscuits
Are you like me? Working on 'difficult' subjects? So.... Take care of yourself and your friends. Here is something more relaxing…. Try my...
Feb 11, 20242 min read


History, Mental Health, and Psychiatry: 5 Shifts
Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...
Feb 11, 202415 min read


‘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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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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