Susan Thorne
| Title: | Associate Professor |
| Office Location: | 336 Carr Building |
| Office Phone: | (919) 684-8945 |
| Email Address: | sthorne@duke.edu |
| Web Page: | http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/sthorne |
- Office Hours:
- Monday and Wednesdays 4:30-5:30 and by appointment
Education
- PhD University of Michigan, 1990
- MA University of Michigan, 1984
- BA University of North Carolina, 1981
Research Interests
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 Effect: 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.
- HISTORY 49S.01, FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR (TOP)
Synopsis
- West Duke 100, Th 04:25 PM-06:55 PM
- AAAS 49S.01, FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR (TOP)
- West Duke 100, Th 04:25 PM-06:55 PM
- HISTORY 113B.01, EUR COLONIAL ENCOUNTER
Synopsis
- Friedl Bdg 107, TuTh 11:40 AM-12:55 PM
- HISTORY 107B.01, MODERN BRITAIN
Synopsis
- Trent 040, MF 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
- ICS 180F.01, MODERN BRITAIN
- Trent 040, MF 10:05 AM-11:20 AM
- HISTORY 209S.01, RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER
- Carr 114, M 06:00 PM-08:30 PM
Recent Publications
Journal Articles- S. Thorne. "Imperial Pieties." History Workshop Journal 63:1 (Spring, 2007). [Imperial Pieties]
- S. Thorne. "Review Essay: Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867." Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6:1 (2005). [html]
- S. Thorne, "Religion and Empire" in Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose ed., At Home With the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- S. Thorne, "Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History". The European Legacy 12:2 (March, 2007): 270-271. [PDF]
- S. Thorne, "Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, 2002), Jeffrey Cox". Victorian Studies 47:2 (2005): 295-297. [html]