Born to Christian medical-missionary parents, Bourke was brought up in New Zealand, Zambia, Solomon Islands and Haiti. She attended the University of Auckland, gaining a BA and Masters in History. She undertook her PhD at the Australian National University and subsequently held academic posts at the ANU, Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Birkbeck, University of London. Her primary affiliation is with Birkbeck, University of London, but she is also Professor of Rhetoric at , London, and the in the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle, NSW. She has joint British and New Zealand citizenship. Bourke, who describes herself as a "socialist feminist", has published in academic journals or edited collections. Her books include ones on British, Irish, American, Australia, and Haitian history from the late eighteenth century to the present. They focus on topics such as women's history, gender, working-class culture, war and masculinity, the cultural history of fear, the history of rape, war art, pain, militarisation, the history of what it means to be human, and animal-human relations. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek. An Intimate History of Killing won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize. It was in the final shortlist for the W. H. Smith Literary Prize. Bourke is frequent contributor to TV and radio, a blogger and tweeter, and a regular correspondent for newspapers and popular journals. Her 40-CD audio history of Britain, entitled "Eyewitness", won Gold for Best Audio Production for Volume 1910-19, Gold for Best Audio Production for Volume 1940-49, and Gold for the Most Original Audio for all 10 volumes. Social Media: @shme_bbk and @bourke_joanna. Bourke lives in London. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. She is the Principle Investigator for a Wellcome Trust project called or Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters, which explores the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence. The project aims to move beyond shame to address this global health crisis. is an interdisciplinary research project, with PhD scholars, post-docs, a film-maker, visiting fellows and professors, and a public engagement and events organiser. SHaME spans both historical and contemporary, regional and global perspectives. It is committed to research and activism involving minoritised communities. As part of this project Bourke is writing one book on the medical and psychiatric aspects of sexual violence in the UK, US, Ireland, and Australasia, followed by another on the global history of sexual violence.
Selected works
Husbandry and Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Working-Class Cultures in Britain, 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity, Routledge, 1994.
