Joanna Bourke

Joanna Bourke is a social and cultural historian whose scholarship examines emotion, gender, military culture, pain, and changing ideas of humanity. Fear: A Cultural History traces how people in modern societies have named, interpreted, and managed fear across roughly two centuries. Rather than treating emotion as timeless, Bourke brings together psychology, philosophy, medicine, popular culture, and historical testimony to show how its meanings shift. Her wider books include An Intimate History of Killing, What It Means to Be Human, and The Story of Pain. She taught for decades at Birkbeck and is a Fellow of the British Academy.