Joanna Bourke is a historian and academic known for her research on violence, gender, war, and the history of emotions. She is a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, and has written widely on the cultural history of conflict, pain, and human behavior. Bourke’s work examines how societies interpret violence and moral transgression across different historical periods. She is the author of Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker, published by Reaktion Books in 2026, which studies five notorious criminal cases to analyze how female violence has been represented and interpreted in modern media and public discourse.