Professor Joanna Bourke

(Elected 2024)

Pain. Rape. Dismemberment. War. Bestiality. Violence. Sexual harms. Shame. These are just a few of the cheering topics that Professor Joanna Bourke has illuminated through her work. They lie in sharp contrast to the person that Joanna is: joyful, funny, warm and generous. Perhaps this is exactly the sort of person one has to be in order to write about such difficult things.

Joanna once said that the American feminist poet Adrienne Rich was one of her favourites; and reading through Rich's much-celebrated work can give us insight into the spirit that animates Joanna.

"I came to explore the wreck", writes Rich. "The words are purposes/The words are maps/I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail."

Joanna has been a critical witness to damage for her whole life. She was the child of medical missionaries, who built hospitals and offered care in places that had been marked by violence, poverty, and global inequality. Perhaps this is where the desire to denaturalize and historicise this damage began.

As she travelled the troubled world, Joanna wrangled her own education through correspondence courses, and this may have been for the best. It's difficult to imagine Joanna's capacious and creative thinking being trapped in something as conventional as grade school. And this is the first way in which Joanna is a true Birkbeckian: taking as she did a twisted and original path into higher education.

Eventually, the conventional did come. She graduated with an undergraduate degree and a Master of Arts from the University of Auckland and then went on to complete a Doctorate at the Australian National University in Canberra. Then, most conventionally of all, she held a fellowship at Cambridge, before escaping to the decidedly unconventional Birkbeck; which, in her words, felt like a 'let out of jail free card'. A gifted speaker; she was the college's orator for many years and gave several fellowship orations in fact, honouring others with her characteristic warmth and storytelling flare. In 2014, she was elected as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in recognition of her work both inside and outside the academy.

Joanna has collaborated with, and thought alongside, hundreds of others in the course of her incredible and productive career. Those who Joanna has supervised, taught with, and thought with, speak with a nearly united voice. Joanna Bourke is both brilliant and generous. She is engaged and interested in the work of others, even when it has little to do with her own. She is an intellectual giant who seeks to open doors for others, who is extremely successful and high-achieving but who, 'actively creates opportunities to bring others up, and along, with her.' One colleague said, "Champagne and joy and excitement were her contributions, in addition to her books."

Joanna, in the words of several who have known her over many decades, is courageous. She takes risks in her work; and is unafraid to ask and try to answer the Big Questions. As a public historian, she has never been afraid to put history to use in controversial causes. Her generosity of spirit sits alongside her elite success. For those unlucky enough to have not had the chance to work with Joanna as a colleague or a student, her immensely popular and important books will be the way they know her. She began in the field of women's history, at a historical moment when the ivory towers of the academy were only just cottoning on to the fact that women existed and had histories. Her postdoctoral work produced the Wolfson and Fraenkel prize-winning book An Intimate History of Killing, where Joanna began to develop a trademark of her work: it makes you squirm. It would be far easier to understand killing as something that scars a person. But this book showed, with incisive prose and meticulous research, that all too often killing could become a joy and pleasure. That war and other forms of state violence could transform ordinary people into enthusiastic killers. That this is something that may well lie inside us all.

But hard truths never benefit from being disregarded, and Joanna insists on staring at them. In 2022, she was nearly cancelled by New South Wales Minister for the Arts before she gave a talk at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas, about her work on bestiality, but she was able to speak and to insist that those feigning outrage not look away from the difficult moral issues of our own and past times.

Be it her work on Fear, on Rape, on Pain, Joanna has fostered a commitment to understanding some of humanity's darkest and most difficult corners. But she does so in a way that also illuminates, to return to Adrienne Rich, 'the treasures that prevail'. The thread that runs through all her work is the question of what it means to be human - the title of one of her books: where does the animal end and the human begin? Why are 'good' people capable of such horrors? How do we address the historic, endemic, ongoing catastrophe that is sexual violence? And how does our thinking about ourselves change over time? And while some of the answers to these questions are squirm-worthy, Joanna never loses sight of her fascination and love for human beings.

In her own words, "a painful world is also a world of meaning".

And in Joanna's world, these meanings are never fixed. Joanna works with the blurry lines between things, the fluid, the subversive, the uncertain, the unsettled and the unsettling. She appears to be totally unwilling to labour anywhere but in greyscale. In a world where more and more people think and act in simple black and white, Joanna's work is nothing short of essential.

Joanna is also a Birkbeckian through and through. She has been a hugely positive force in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology (now the School of Historical Studies); though in her characteristic way she chooses to focus more on what the Department has done for her. "My colleagues and students created my career," she said at her retirement event, but she shaped theirs as well; from the hundreds, if not thousands, of students who were taught by her, to the over thirty PhD students who she supervised, to fellow historians who came to the department early in their careers and encountered the welcoming, joyful, intellectual force that is Joanna Bourke. One of the most recent books she wrote was a history of the first 200 years of Birkbeck; both its worth and its warts. She emerged from this writing more convinced than ever of Birkbeck's immense value. She wrote, "by creating free thinking, independent, and culturally aware citizens of the globe, Birkbeck provides a basis for exploring the irreducible plurality of the human condition."