Lydia Murdoch
Lydia Murdoch earned her BA in History from Vassar College and her PhD in Modern British History and Victorian Studies from Indiana University. She is author of Daily Life of Victorian Women (2014) and Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (2006). Her third book, What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2025), traces changing understandings of child death in British, imperial, and transatlantic contexts, revealing the importance of youth and emotion to constructions of the modern state. She is currently researching the use of children as medical subjects, particularly in the global spread of the first smallpox vaccines.
Professor Murdoch’s classes include a first-year writing seminar on “The First World War,” “Victorian Britain,” “The British Empire,” and “The History of Childhood in Modern Britain,” in addition to co-taught multidisciplinary classes such as “Smallpox: The Biology and History of a Disease” and “Revolution, Evolution, and the Global Nineteenth Century.”
Contact
Box 638
Research and Academic Interests
Modern British and Imperial History
History of Childhood
Women and Gender
Urban History
History of Emotions
History of Medicine
Departments and Programs
Courses
HIST 151 British History: James I (1603) to the Great War
HIST/VICT 354 History and the Politics of Grief
HIST/VICT /WMST355 Childhood and Children in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Selected Publications
Books
- What We Mourn: Child Death and the Politics of Grief in Nineteenth-Century Britain (University of Virginia Press, 2025).
- Daily Life of Victorian Women (Greenwood Press, 2014; paperback Bloomsbury, 2024).
- Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (Rutgers University Press, 2006). ACLS E-Book, 2007.
Guest Editor
- Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8.3 (Fall 2015), special issue on childhood and death co-edited with Kathleen Jones and Tamara Myers.
Recent Articles and Chapters
- “‘What I Did at Vassar Stayed with Me’: Victorian Studies and Activism, a Case Study,” co-authored with Susan Zlotnick, Victorian Literature and Culture 51.4 (Winter 2023): 645-659.
- “Leaving Victorian Studies Behind: The Case of Vassar College,” co-authored with Susan Zlotnick, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 1.1 (Spring/Summer 2022): 53-62.
- “Guest Editors’ Introduction,” with Kathleen Jones and Tamara Myers, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8.3 (Fall 2015): 339-340.
- “‘The Dead and the Living;’: Child Death, the Public Mortuary Movement, and the Spaces of Grief and Selfhood in Victorian London,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8.3, special issue guest edited by Kathleen Jones, Lydia Murdoch, and Tamara Myers (Fall 2015): 378-402.
- “Anti-vaccination and the Politics of Grief for Children in Late-Victorian England,” in Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan History of Emotions Series, 2015), 242-260.
- “Carrying the Pox: The Use of Children and Ideals of Childhood in Early British and Imperial Campaigns Against Smallpox,” The Journal of Social History 48.3 (Spring 2015): 511-535. Winner of the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s 2016 Fass-Sandin Prize for Best Article (English).
- “Alice and the Question of Victorian Childhood,” in The Age of Alice: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Nonsense in Victorian England: An Exhibition Catalogue (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College Libraries, 2015), 11-19.
- “‘Suppressed Grief’: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion,” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 51.2 (April 2012): 364-392. Winner of the 2012 INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) Essay Prize.
Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards
- National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2024.
- Winner of the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s Fass-Sandin Prize for Best Article (English), 2016.
- Howard Fellowship, The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, Brown University, 2014-2015, postponed 2015-2016.
- Winner of the INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) Essay Prize, 2012.
- National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Stipend, 2002.
- Walter L. Arnstein Dissertation Prize for Research in Victorian Studies, 1998.
In the Media
Photos
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