Imperial Pieties

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.