• BA Modern History, Birkbeck College, University of London
• PhD University of Sussex

Hera Cook is a New Zealander and initially worked in the theatre there as a set and costume designer before  being privileged to take her BA at Birkbeck College, University of London. Following this she received an ESRC Doctoral Award and spent the first year of hermy PhD research at the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene before transferring to the University of Sussex where I was supervised by Professor Pat Thane. My Thesis was entitled The Long Sexual Revolution: British Women, Sex and Contraception in the Twentieth Century.

Following completion of the PhD, I obtained a Leverhulme Foundation Study Abroad Studentship, which was held at the Department of History, University of Sydney. I then obtained a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. The Research Project was entitled Emotional Behaviour in England 1930-1980 and again was held at the Department of History, University of Sydney.

From 2005, I have been a lecturer in the Department of Modern History at the University of Birmingham

First year

• Research Seminars:
• Women's Liberation: Sexuality, Work and Race.
• Children and ‘Sexualization’

Second year

• Option:  Sexual Change in England, 1900 – 2000
• Group Research: Racism in Birmingham 1950-1970

Third Year

• Emotion in mid-20^th century Britain

Postgraduate

• MPhil taught course: Historical Methodologies: (theory and schools of history)
• MA Topics supervised include:  The Middle Class Housewife and World War Two, Gay Pride in Birmingham 1970-1999, Death in British Newspapers during the Second World War

I am happy to supervise projects in these or related fields:

• The history of sexuality
• The history of emotion and feelings
• Women in the 19^th and 20^th century
• Masculinity

My current research interest is in the control of emotion in 20th century England.

I am also working on a biography of Joan and Miles Malleson. Joan was a sexologist and a founding member of the Abortion Law Reform Association. Miles was a character actor and playwright whose career included writing and acting in a wide variety of films from the hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) to Canon Chasuble in The Importance of being Earnest (1952). Their lives and their marriage illuminate some of the major changes in gender, sexuality and emotional behaviour in mid-20th century England.

I have also undertaken research on the Nudist movement and on sex education.

My first book The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception in England 1800-1975 (OUP, 2004) presented a major new argument about the causes of sexual change from the early 19^th century to the late 20th century. The book traced the path of sexuality in England, and showed how its route was determined by the gradual exertion of control over fertility. Most sexual activity had major economic and social costs, the most fundamental of which was the previously ignored physical cost of children upon women's bodies. Around 1800 birth rates reached historical heights. Using a combination of demographic and qualitative sources, I examined the connection between the struggle to lower fertility and the increasing repression of sexuality throughout the nineteenth century. Contraception became a viable option in the early twentieth century. The book charts the resulting slow relaxation of attitudes to sexuality and the remaking of heterosexual physical behaviour culminating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s

Books

• The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception1800-1975’ Oxford University Press, Oxford (2004).
  Winner of the 2004 Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality www.fsssonline.org/

Articles

• 'Teenage pregnancy. Understanding English trends over time: the historical perspective' Teenage Pregnancy and Reproductive Health, 52nd Royal College Of Gynaecologists and Obstetricians Study Group, May 2007.
• 'Sexuality and Contraception in Modern England: Doing the History of Reproductive Sexuality' Journal of Social History 40.4 Summer 2007.
• ‘The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change’ History Workshop Journal, Spring 2005; 59: 109 - 128.
• ‘Demography and the history of sexuality’ H.Cocks, and M.Houlbrook, (eds) The Palgrave Guide to the History of Sexuality in the Modern West Palgrave/MacMillan, London. 2005
• ‘Sex and the Experts: medicalisation as a two way process, Britain 1920-1950.’C.Usborne, and W. de Blecourt, eds., “Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine in Early Modern and Modern Europe” Palgrave/MacMillan, London. 2003.
• ‘Unseemly and Unwomanly Behaviour’: comparing women’s control of their fertility in Britain and Australia.’ Journal of Population Research (Australia): Volume 17.2. November 2000
• ‘No turning back: family forms and sexual mores in modern Britain’ History & Policy Autumn/Summer Issue (2003).(This is a web publication intended to bring historians’ research to the attention of policy makers)

Reviews

• Any friend of the movement: Networking for birth control, 1920-1940, 2004, Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer and Beyond the reproductive body: The Politics of Women's Health and Work in Eearly Victorian England, 2004, Majorie Levine-Clark, Nursing Inquiry 13.4: 305-7, Dec 2006.
•  ‘Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth Century Britain,’ by Marcus Collins, Women's History Review 15.1: 182-184 March 2006.
•  Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve by Self, Helen, Social History of Medicine, 18.2: 328 – 329: August 2005.
•  Short Notice: Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century. 2003, by Harry Cocks, Journal of Religious History 2005.
•  Short Notice: Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600. 2003, by Helmut Puff. Journal of Religious History 17.1: 2004.
•  ‘Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome & the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder,’ by Elizabeth Armstrong, Social History of Medicine, 17: 524 – 525 Dec 2004.
•  ‘The technology of orgasm: "hysteria," the vibrator, and women's sexual satisfaction,’ by Rachel P. Maines. Women’s History Review 12.4, 2003.
•  ‘Sexual Chemistry: a History of the Contraceptive Pill,’ by Lara V. Marks. Gender and History 16.2 Aug 2004.
•  ‘Sex and Medicine: Gender, Power and Authority in the Medical Profession,’ by Rosemary Pringle, 1999. Journal of International Gender Studies 2001.
•  ‘Sex Surveyed, 1949-1994: from Mass Observation's 'Little Kinsey' to the National survey and the Hite reports,’ by Liz Stanley, 1995.’ 9.2 Gender and History 1997.