Just two months after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC, Fox TV broadcast the first of their series ‘24’. The main...

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

Between 25 and 40 million people worldwide have died as a result of opportunistic infections arising from AIDS or Acquired...

What does tuberculosis look like? If we are thinking about the early-nineteenth century, we might imagine an emaciated, white, male...

In April 1973, cinemas throughout America began screening a tearjerking love story, the plot of which revolved around sickle cell...

The Great Cat Massacre in New York City began in July 1916. By the end of that month, 72,000 cats and around 8,000 dogs had been...

A few weeks before writing this blog, I was launching a book that I had recently published. A former PhD student of mine and someone I...

It is impossible not to be charmed by Athens. At night, bouzouki music wells up from dark basements; tables spill out of ouzeris, around...

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

Is sex a ‘good thing’? Is celibacy dangerous? How can we understand the explosive violence of Incels, those young men (primarily) whose...

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

Pornography is divisive. It is guaranteed to incite heated debates between people inhabiting different subject positions based on...

What do we mean when we talk about the ‘perversions’? Who gets to decide what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? The concept of ‘perversion’ is...

Throughout human history, sexual danger has regulated social lives and subjectivities. From the ‘yellow press’ of the late nineteenth...

Walking into the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution (as it was then called) in the 1890s could be a dispiriting experience....

Sexual violence and abuse are ingrained into military cultures. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which...

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

In this blog, I reflect on the devastating conclusions of a report by the Defense Committee (25 July 2021) entitled ‘Protecting Those Who...

bell hooks has been an enduring presence in my life. I first read her 1981 classic Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism as an...

Suddenly feeling a lump in one’s breast is terrifying, yet it is an experience suffered by one in every eight women in Britain and...