Judith Walkowitz

Judith Walkowitz is a Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a British historian whose publications have been translated into many European languages, plus Japanese. For the past thirty years, her research and writing have concentrated on nineteenth-century political culture and the cultural and social contests over sexuality. Her first book, Prostitution and Victorian Society (1980), examined the system of medical and police regulation of prostitution, a system first established in 1864 and abolished in 1886, to control the spread of venereal disease among enlisted men. City of Dreadful Delight (1992) maps out a dense cultural grid through which compelling representations of sexual danger, including W.T. Stead’s expose of child prostitution and the tabloid reporting of Jack the Ripper, circulated in late-Victorian London.

Her new book, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (Yale University Press, March 2012), extends her interest in the cultural and social history of London to mid-twentieth century, zeroing in on a modern space of multiethnic settlement in London that was at the center of things, yet marked by segregation, political tensions, and social exploitation.