When I became a Birkbeck Fellow, I used the opportunity to reflect on my own personal history and how I became a writer.

A möbius strip: 'Which side of the strip are the ants walking on?'. (A 1963 poster of a woodcut by M. C. Escher) The concept ‘the human’...

Why aren’t gay, lesbian, trans, and queer people full citizens in law? This question enraged gay activists in 1990s Britain. The HIV/AIDS...

Caption: Reception for the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence. Left to right: Professor Joanna Bourke, Julia...

I loved working with the SHaME (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters) team over 5 and a half years. SHaME’s Public Engagement Lead, Dr...

The SHaME project have talked to some incredible people who reflect on sexual violence and ways to create rape-free worlds. You can...

The events I have enjoyed most in connection with the SHaME project were our two Shameless! Festivals of Activism Against Sexual...

For five and a half years, I have been privileged to work with the SHaME team at Birkbeck. It has been the most intellectually rewarding...

Audre Lorde changed the way generations of feminists throughout the world think about intersectional identities, social justice, and the...

Are you like me? Working on 'difficult' subjects? So.... Take care of yourself and your friends. Here is something more relaxing…. Try...

Clare Shaw, Towards a General Theory of Love (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2022)     Clare Shaw’s new, prize-winning poetry collection is...

On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...

William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...

On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...

Robairt Clough was a long-term patient at Holywell Psychiatric Hospital in Antrim (Northern Ireland). In the Christmas 1972 edition of...

Tragedy struck Edith Cecil-Porch Maturin four times between 1900 and 1917. First, her twelve-year-old son died in 1900, followed five...

What do we get when we lend our ears to Eric Hobsbawm? Passion. Energy. Exhilarating sweeps of time; giddy swoops into political darkness...

Sleep is necessary to life. However, it remains shrouded in mystery, despite the fact that most people spend one third of their lives...

What does it mean to be human? We inhabit a world that is commonly, and lazily, dubbed ‘post-human’. Indeed, in recent decades, an anti...

We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...