When I became a Birkbeck Fellow, I used the opportunity to reflect on my own personal history and how I became a writer.

A möbius strip: 'Which side of the strip are the ants walking on?'. (A 1963 poster of a woodcut by M. C. Escher) The concept ‘the human’...

Caption: Reception for the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence. Left to right: Professor Joanna Bourke, Julia...

For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...

Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022)     Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is...

This is a short piece from my book, Disgrace (Reaktion Books, 2022) Sexual violence: it is a difficult subject to talk about. There is...

In September 1971, Ebony magazine published an article that broke a major taboo: a survivor of breast cancer wrote candidly about her...

To whom does a woman’s body belong? In mid-nineteenth century Britain, this question provoked impassioned debates between moralists,...

Why is monogamy such a big deal? What can a history of fidelity and infidelity reveal about the changing rights, duties, and social...

In the 1870s, middle-class women carried ‘dagger-fans’ when alone in public places; in the early 1900s, they hosted ‘jujitsu parties’ for...