Research Interests for Susan Thorne

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.

Keywords:

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

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)

Areas of Interest:

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

Recent 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
3. S. Thorne, Imperial Pieties, History Workshop Journal, vol. 63 no. 1 (Spring, 2007), Oxford University Press
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]