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.
| Office Location: | 336 Carr Building |
| Office Phone: | (919) 684-8945 |
| Email Address: | |
| Web Page: | http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/sthorne |
Teaching (Fall 2012):
| PhD | University of Michigan | 1990 |
| MA | University of Michigan | 1984 |
| BA | University of North Carolina | 1981 |
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.