 Hello, I'm Carolyn Strange, I'm the Graduate Director in the School of History in the Research School of Social Sciences within the College of Arts and Social Sciences at ANU. And it's my pleasure today to welcome Professor Joanna Burke. Joanna is Professor of History at Birkbeck College at the University of London where she has taught since 1992. She has been awarded as a historian numerous times and most recently in 2014 she was named a Fellow of the British Academy. Professor Burke is currently in Australia as the School of History's Alan Martin lecturer. She was invited to take up this honour after a 25-year career as a scholar who fearlessly tackles the biggest questions in human history, including fear itself and what it means to be human. Joanna, welcome to ANU. Hi, it's really fantastic being back. Well yes, you say being back, in fact you have a longer history in connection with ANU. So I wonder if you could tell us what drew you to history and why you chose ANU to do your PhD? I think it's just a wonderful privilege to be an historian. It's one of the most exciting disciplines I think around right now. One of the things I like on sort of telling people is that being an historian is like being a voyeur. You get to peek into everyone's lives and work out what they did, read their love letters and things like that. So it's a great, great profession. But I think I'm really, really lucky that my career started here at the ANU. I came from New Zealand and when I was offered a PhD scholarship here it was a great opportunity for me. I ended up working with some of the most eminent historians in the field. My supervisor was a wonderful man who worked on History of Ireland, Professor Oliver McDonough, who was probably one of the most distinguished Irish historians of the period. But there wasn't only him. The place was just heaving with intellectual discussions, debates, arguments, but it was always a wonderfully collegiate place I think to work. And when you were doing your research for your PhD and in the first few years that followed that you focused on Irish and British working class history with a particular focus on gender. And then you moved in a new direction in the mid-1990s when you started to focus on war, the cultural history of war and militarism. And your biggest impact I think in that field came in 1996 with the publication of your work, dismembering the male men's bodies Britain and the Great War published in 1996. So what was it that turned you from working class history to the history of militarism? It's a really interesting question because one thing I discovered, I didn't really intend to make the move from working class history and gender history to warfare and violence, but of course the only time that working class people actually write diaries and let us home at least ones that survive is during wartime. So when I was writing the book on working class cultures in modern Britain, I ended up going to the Imperial War Museum in London not because I was interested in war, but simply because I was interested in reading diaries written by working class men. That's where they were. And of course I got completely hooked. I mean, one of the things that kind of really struck me is really interesting, at least at the time, that there was this kind of disjunction between what I was reading in these diaries and the historiography, what other historians had said. Many of those historians had read the same diaries, but I was interpreting them in very, very different ways. And I think part of that was, of course, I was coming from very much a gender perspective. And it was that was a bit new at that stage, certainly in military history that was new. But also I think I actually kind of fell in love with some of these men whose diaries I was reading. I mean, they're very intimate. And I was struck by the fact that, you know, sometimes in these diaries you would actually see the handwriting change and it would start shaking. And the man had just come back, for example, from combat and was saying, you know, I don't think I can cope anymore. You know, I've got diarrhea. I think I'm a coward. I'm worried that, you know, I'm just falling to bits. And you could see, you know, the trauma and the historians would read that bit of the diary and say, ah, shell shock. But that same person, that same diary, a few, you know, a few weeks or even a few days later would also come back from combat and would say, yes, you know, I'm a man exhilarated. It was a wonderful battle. And of course, other Steins had read that and were saying, ah, he can't mean it. It must be the genre. So I became really fascinated by, OK, what happens if we actually take these accounts seriously? And so that that was where the dismembering the mailbook came came from. And after that, I wrote a number of other books on the history of warfare. Well, you've also helped to pioneer another field, and that is the field of the history of emotions. And particularly fear and anxiety have have that's obviously a bridge from your interest in militarism, but also your your interest in gender history and the history of rape. But I can say myself that I found your 2003 article, which discusses how we study and write about the history of emotions, particularly inspiring and provocative. And so it's one that I personally returned to. And that work that you have have done over the past 15 years or so seems to have led you into this new project, which you co-founded and currently direct the Birkbeck trauma project. So your team includes neurologists, anthropologists, literary scholars and so forth. Yet you say it's led by history. So can you explain how that trauma center came to be and why you have constructed it as an interdisciplinary research unit? Yeah, the trauma, a trauma center that I that I established and a work that's really my base right now. It came out of a project I did, which is on the history of pain. And this project was funded by the Wellcome Trust. And it was an attempt, I think, to to say, well, you know, we always hear people saying that pain is unspeakable, difficult to communicate. And actually, that struck me as perhaps not a useful and not actually true to my own experience. And so what I want to do is I want to look at how people in pain from the 18th century to the present, how the languages that they use to communicate their pain with other people. And I was actually really amazed that they really they rich languages that people used, the rich metaphorical languages that, in other words, that people in pain actually desperately sought to communicate their pain, not only, of course, to physicians, but also to their loved ones. So that that's where the trauma project came from. Because, of course, once I started working on physical pain, the body, it became very, very obvious very quickly that you can't separate physical pain and psychological or emotional pain, that those two things are completely intertwined. There's no there's no physical pain without a psychological and emotional component. There's no psychological pain without a physiological component. So this is why the pain project really changed into the trauma project. And of course, I'm using the word trauma here, not in the way we use it today, which is very much emotional trauma. I'm using it in the classical Greek sense, trauma, in other words, that what trauma is, what trauma is, is both the physical wound, the wound on the body, but also, of course, the psychic, the emotional wound. And that's that's that's what the project's about, which is why it actually is a very very it has to be an interdisciplinary project. And one of the things that we tend to do is to think of pain as personal and trauma as collective. So does your center work reflexively in that respect? Yes, it does. I think that there is a sense that pain is something subjective, internal. But of course, pain is also the most public thing language that we use to understand pain, to actually change pain from this internal thing into this public thing. That is absolutely crucial to to what it's about. So this relationship between a subjective, the private and the public is also something that we we interrogate. Well, one of the things we ask of the Alan Martin lecturer is to give a public talk and the topic of your talk is aggression. So what can a historian contribute to an understanding of an emotion and a form of behavior which we share with animals and which seems timeless? Yeah, I'm really looking forward to talking about and doing much more work on aggression because, of course, aggression itself, the term has its own history. In fact, the way we tend to use it today, in other words, aggression as a personality trait or as interpersonal violence is actually very, very recent. That's actually a late 19th century use of the term in the earlier from the 16th century onwards, the word aggression is much more about states. It's about armed groups. So what my current project is actually looking at the way the term aggression changes over time, but also looking at who's excluded from that aggression concept. So the aggression project is partly a history of the term, but it's also partly a history of a particular group of people, ballistic scientists and why they have been conventionally excluded from this aggressive label, mainly because of their class, because of their comportment, because of their gender, you know, because their white middle and upper class men is basically who we're talking about here, but they've been excluded from this. And yet, of course, they dedicate their lives to producing weapons that can mutilate other people, mutilate and kill other people. Perhaps the most aggressive act imaginable. So it's the concept and it's also going ballistic. You know, who are who are these men? Well, that, of course, takes you back to issues of gender and class. And so so the circling back to the original interests, but applied to new questions and new fields of research. It's exactly because power is at the heart of it. Who has the right to decide if something is aggressive or not? And conventionally, of course, the people who have made those decisions are people in power, they are judges, they are prison officers, they are policemen, they are politicians, they are ballistic scientists or scientists more generally, these people are the ones who decide what who is an aggressive person and who is actually just doing instrumental science or instrumental violence. Well, turning to one of your most recent books, as you mentioned, The Story of Pain from Prayer to Pain Killers, published by Oxford University Press in 2014, you have stated that you enjoyed doing the research for this book. Now, that might sound very puzzling to people. So could you tell us what was enjoyable about that? I think, I think from his again, this comes back to why I love being an historian, because I think people are just remarkable and history gives us a way of looking into other people's lives. And what really I found enjoyable about the pain book is that you can see how, OK, pain is this negative force, pain does destroy people, it destroys communities, but it can also be this most creative act. It can actually create communities, it can create alliances between people. And one of the things I try to do in this book is to say, well, look, if we look back in the past to see how people in the past coped with immense suffering, terrible, terrible suffering, we actually today in the present can learn how to suffer better. And that that that's I think it's a hopeful message. I think it's a really positive message, at least that's that's how I see it. Well, I want to turn to another aspect of your career, which you excel at, and that is communicating history across a variety of media, in particular radio. So I'm just wondering what you feel history owes to the public and why you think history off the books, as it were, is an important aspect of a historian's service. I think there's a lot of people, a lot of academics today, who are saying the same thing, and that is they're saying, OK, we need to get back to the I word, the intellectual word. We have a as academics. We have a duty to people to actually engage with the real world. This idea of the ivory tower, firstly, it's it's always been a myth. The wrong I word. Yes, it's definitely the wrong I word, but it's always been a myth. We've intellectuals have always engaged and we need to actually assert our pleasure and assert our politics in engaging with people in the present. And I think history itself isn't a really privileged position to do that because the problems that we are facing today, they're not new. They have a history. Things are not always the same. And a lot of my work has been on violence. I've heard a history of rapists I've written on, as you mentioned, a lot of books on warfare. And I think it's really useful to say, well, as an historian, I can say and I can prove to you that actually sexual violence is not a necessary part of what it means to be human, that there have been periods in history where there's no war, very little violence and we can negotiate those sorts of new worlds. We can create new worlds and the past gives us some hints on how to do that. I mean, we obviously we can't relive the past, but we can take ideas from the past, stimulation from the past and be more imaginative about how we address current problems. Well, I've noted that your work has covered fear, anxiety, war, rape, trauma. Is Joanna Burke ever going to write a book on happiness? The only time I ever had writer's block was when I was commissioned to write a book on love. I just think violence is intrinsically interesting. And it's so important for all of our lives. And we also have a I think we have a duty as global citizens to actually talk about violence, to actually fight actively to reduce violence in our society. And that's that's what drives me. Well, we're still going to wait for a book about love from Joanna Burke. But Joanna, I really appreciate your talking to us and sharing your passion, enthusiasm and insight into what history can offer the present. Thank you. It's been lovely talking to you.