Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published seven books, on Irish history, gender and "the body", the history of psychological thought, modern warfare, the emotions, and sexual violence. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish. "An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare"(Granta) won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History for 1998 and the Wolfson History Prize for 2000. Her book entitled "Fear: A Cultural History" was published by Virago in 2005. Her history of rapists in Century 19-20, entitled "Rape: A History from 1860s to the Present", was published by Virago in September 2007.

Joanna Bourke is a historian who teaches History at Birbick College at London University. Her field of interests include the history of fear, modern warfare, emotions, history of thought, and genre and the "feminine body".

World Social Summit's interest in Bourke derives from her research on fear, which is lucidly exposed in her book "Fear: A Cultural History".

"Fear: A Cultural History" is an incisive socio-cultural study which puts into perspective what fear meant at different periods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was her publication which influenced World Social Summit (WSS) on organising this year's summit around this theme.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of her research is how the aspect of fear has changed in the last 150 years. Her vivid account on how the consciousness of fear has changed through time offers a thoughtful insight why contemporary societies, especially in the in the West, are obsessed by such a variety of anxieties. Her book examines the predominant fears experienced and documented in Britain and the United States over the last century and a half. She addresses topics such phobias, fear of God and death, nightmares, children's worries, sickness, crime and terrorism.

There are interesting comparisons of fears that have dominated the late nineteenth century societies and those of our own time. Fear of death is probably the one universal fear that crosses all societies throughout history, but the contrast on how the late nineteenth century Western societies dealt with the anxiety of death, compared with the societies of the late twentieth century is astonishing. In one her early chapters Bourke explains how in the nineteenth century fears relating to imminent death were intimately connected to anxiety about the accurate diagnosis of death, in other words about being buried alive (which led some funeral impresarios to come out with some creative products such as a coffin complete with a breathing tube to the surface and a folding ladder for climbing out of the grave, along with other pragmatic solutions such as having one's throats slit before burial). This radically contrasts to our own world, where we are much more likely to be fearful about being obliged to stay alive, against our will, attached to machines and not allowed to die with dignity.

In short, we have moved in a little more than a century from the fear of being buried alive to being afraid of being dead, but kept alive by therapeutic science.

Bourke does not devote any time to the role of the media, but it is interesting to note that some particular types of alarms, such as child abuse or paedophilia, come up from time to time in history, mostly stoked up by the media. But media reports have been present even outside the time periods where panics have not been present. It is therefore interesting to analyse what type of environment or fertile ground is required so a certain type of terror needs to grow and take hold.

There are many anecdotal examples of which Bourke uses to travel through time in her exposition on the developmental stages of creation and expansion of fear, but fear being a human emotion, its cultural definition and acceptance has differed depending on the person experiencing it. Not only time and historical context, but gender, class, urban versus rural environment , age, for example, provoke their own dynamics on how fear is experienced in every day life. In this sense, gender has provided different streams of interpretation on how fear is experienced in contemporary lfe. Bourke explains on how men and women tend to respond differently to the very idea of fear, sometimes tearing apart long held stereotypes.

One particular fear that women all over experience is rape, which is the subject Bourke's last book. Her "Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present" was published in 2007. Rape is for women, especially in the Western urban landscape, the one anxiety which conditions their behaviour, from the way they dress to where to go and at what time.

The fear of rape is obviously predominantly experienced by women (but not only, this fear is also present in men; in some societies, such as in the United States and the UK, fear of rape inside detention centres is a for some a bigger deterrent that prison itself) but this is part of the bigger picture of fear of crime and of "strangers". Incredibly, fear of rape is aggravated by the unhelpful attitude of the justice system, by its' history of squaring the guilt on the victim instead on the perpetrator, thus entangling fear and distrust of protective authorities.

Bourke presents an array of viewpoints by which she portrays on how fears and anxieties (interestingly, fear creates scapegoats while anxiety is a prelude to psychosis) have transformed to be what they are today, but she also demonstrates that many mind-sets have not changed at all.

"Terrorists are more daring, they are served by the more terrible weapons offered by modern science, and the world is now days threatened by new forces which, if recklessly unchained, may someday wreak universal destruction".

This quote is taken from Bourke's "Fear: A Cultural History", and if you thought it was said by a security officer after 9/11 in New York, or the Madrid bombings of 2004, or the London bombings of 2005 you could be justified, even if you thought the statement to be a little over the top. But this quote is from an English police officer in 1889, who was commenting on the activities of violent political groups of the time.

Joanna Bourke's contribution to the debate on fear which WSS is trying to install, is foremost the need to historically contextualise the emotion of fear in the conjectural period in which we live, and at the same time provide an insight on what type of environments are needed for fear and anxieties to become social panics.