Imperial Britain 1750-1950, missions and empire, literature and history, poverty and poor relief My research agenda is broadly informed by my interest in the influence of imperialism on the social and political development of the world's first industrial nation. My first book, Congregational missions and the making of an imperial culture in nineteenth-century England (Stanford, 1999), extended my Ph.D dissertation's exploration of missionary influences on Victorian perceptions of the subject populations of the British empire. My research interests have since taken a more domestic turn, focusing primarily on public policy discussions of the welfare of especially orphaned children from the early eighteenth through the middle of the twentieth century. I am currently working on a book-length study of a south London parish in which the city's most eminent chronicler staged the suffering childhoods in which he specialized. “The Dickensian Affect: Reckonings with Reform in Early Victorian Southwark” measures Dickens' contribution to Victorian perceptions of poverty and kinship by comparing the experiences embodied in parish boys like Oliver Twist with the personalities and events recorded in parish records. I have also begun work on a larger project, a collection of topical essays that illuminate the wide ranging ways in which child welfare, public policy and citizenship intersected across the British Empire from the eighteenth century through the present.