My research and teaching interests include the social history of modern Britain, the imperial history of modern Europe, and the ideological intersections of race, crime, and urban poverty in Anglo-American political culture. Congregational missions and the making of an imperial culture in nineteenth-century England (Stanford, 1999) explored the influence of evangelical missionary organizations on Victorian perceptions of colonized people as well as and in relation to the metropolitan poor. My research interests have since taken a more domestic turn. I am working on a local history of a south London parish that figures prominently in the biographical experience and publications of Charles Dickens, perhaps the most influential chronicler of the London poor. A second project is taking me further afield from my scholarly training and closer to home: my family's history and the genealogy of white supremacy in Clarendon County, SC.
Office Location: | 224 Classroom Building, 1356 Campus Drive, Durham, NC 27705 |
Office Phone: | +1 919 684 3014 |
Email Address: | |
Web Page: | http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/history/faculty/sthorne |
Ph.D. | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | 1990 |
M.A. | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | 1984 |
B.A. | University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill | 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)
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. 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 relief of poverty, especially that of 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 popular 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 by comparing the experiences embodied in parish boys like Oliver Twist with the personalities and events recorded in parish records.