Susan Thorne, Associate Professor

Susan Thorne teaches modern British and European colonial history at Duke University. Thorne is particularly interested in how ordinary men and women navigate their political and economic circumstances. Industrialization and imperial expansion figure prominently in her work. Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999) explores foreign missionary influences on popular perceptions of empire and race in nineteenth-century England. Thorne has been working for some time now on the social history and cultural representation of Victorian orphans. She is still working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Dickensian Affect: Reckonings with Reform in Early Victorian Southwark. This book assesses the nature of Dickens' influence on our perception of poverty by juxtaposing his representation of criminal poverty and urban childhood in his most popular novel, Oliver Twist (1837-8) to parish records generated by the poor law’s reform during the 1830s and hungry ‘40s.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	336 Carr Building
Office Phone:	(919) 684-8945
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/sthorne

Teaching (Spring 2012):

• HISTORY 113C.01, CRIME AND THE CITY Synopsis

  Allen 326, MWF 08:45 AM-09:35 AM

  (also cross-listed as AAAS 117.01)

• HISTORY 303S.01, FOCUSING ON TCHNG & PEDAGOGY Synopsis

  Carr 229, Tu 08:45 AM-11:30 AM

• LS 290.70, SELECTED TOPICS Synopsis

  SEE INSTRU, W 06:00 PM-09:00 PM

Education:

PhD	University of Michigan	1990
MA	University of Michigan	1984
BA	University of North Carolina	1981

Specialties:

Comparative Colonial Studies
Race and Ethnicity
Labor and Working Class History
Politics, Public Life and Governance

Research Interests: Imperial Britain 1750-1950, religion and empire, race and class, literature and history, poverty and poor relief, urban crime and orphaned childhoods

Current projects: "The Dickensian Affect: Reckonings with Reform in Early Victorian Southwark" (mss in progress), "The Dickensian Aspect of The Wire" (article, in progress), "Capitalism and Anti-slavery" (article, forthcoming in small axe, March 2012)

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.  “Dickensian Affects: 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.

Areas of Interest:

United Kingdom
London
Ireland
Caribbean
Africa
India
U. S. South

Keywords:

Victorianism • political economy • child welfare • Charles Dickens • London • Empire • poverty • poor relief • missions • religion • orphans • workhouse

Current Ph.D. Students   (Former Students)

• Robert G. Penner  
• Robert G. Penner  

Postdocs Mentored

• Marie Hicks (2010 - August 01, 2011)  
• Paula P. Hastings (2004 - 2010)  

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. S. Thorne, Capitalism and Anti-Slavery, edited by David Scott, small axe no. 37 (March, 2012)  [abs]
2. S. Thorne, Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, The European Legacy, vol. 12 no. 2 (March, 2007), pp. 270-271 [PDF]
3. S. Thorne, Imperial Pieties, History Workshop Journal, vol. 63 no. 1 (Spring, 2007), Oxford University Press [Imperial Pieties]
4. S. Thorne, Religion and Empire, in At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (2006), Cambridge University Press
5. S. Thorne, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002), Jeffrey Cox, Victorian Studies, vol. 47 no. 2 (2005), pp. 295-297 [html]