Breaking news! This is the (draft) cover of my new book. It will be 'out' early next year, with the amazing publisher, Reaktion Books....

Ishiuchi Miyako, ‘ ひろしま/hiroshima ’, #71, 2007.     ‘The photograph gives off mixed signals. Stop this [the violence], it urges. But it...

As part of my frivolous series entitled ‘Let's Lighten Up!’, let me share one of my favourite recipes.   Summer is here, so it is...

This is part of my series called 'Lighten Up'. There are days when a woman needs a cold, bitter cocktail. Here is my latest favourite:...

(This is a version of a talk I gave at the Recovery Histories Network , led by Dr Ruth Beecher, at Birkbeck , University of London, in May 2025. Please note, this blog includes profanity.)     This is a difficult topic to think about, let alone discuss. In this blog, I explore debates about intergenerational sex between older and younger males from the 1970s onwards, with a focus on the largest U.S. organization supporting such sexual activity, NAMBLA or the North American Ma

(This is the spoken version of the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, that I gave at the conference ‘We The People’, Irish Association for American Studies, Trinity College Dublin, 25 April 2025. It is not the ‘final’ version, since I will continue to work on it, but gives a taste of my ideas.)     ‘We the People’. The preamble to the Constitution of the United States (1789) declares that ‘We the People of the United States… do ordain and establish this Constitution’. In the Frenc

In 1929, the Men’s Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that, since the end of the eighteenth-century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by ‘making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts’. He called this event ‘The Great Mascu

In 1859, the Lurgan Mechanics’ Institute was formally inaugurated, ‘in the presence of one of the largest and most fashionable...

Incels is the portmanteau of Involuntary Celibates. They are primarily young men furious about being excluded from romantic and sexual...

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

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

I loved working with the SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters) team over 5 and a half years. SHaME’s Public Engagement Lead, Dr...

Marianne Elliott is one of the greatest living historians of Ireland, with books that have changed the way we think about revolution and...

On 12 June 1993, the editors of the British Medical Journal published an account by a male doctor of being sexually assaulted by another...