Vassar College History Department

Faculty

Originally from Kents Store, Virginia, Lydia Murdoch earned her B.A. in History from Vassar College (1992) and her M.A. and Ph.D. in British History and Victorian Studies from Indiana University (2000). Her book, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London (Rutgers University Press, 2006), is a cultural and social history of child welfare in Victorian London. In it she contrasts middle-class reformers’ images of poor children as abandoned “waifs and strays” with the family backgrounds of institutionalized children reconstructed through archival records. Professor Murdoch is currently working on a social history of Victorian women as well as a study of the Victorians and child mortality.

In addition to introductory Women's Studies and British history courses, Professor Murdoch teaches classes on Victorian Britain, the British Empire, the First World War, and the history of childhood in nineteenth-century Britain. She is also actively involved in Vassar’s Victorian Studies, Urban Studies, and Women’s Studies multidisciplinary programs.

• Nancy Bisaha
• Robert K. Brigham
• Mita Choudhury
• Miriam Cohen
• Rebecca Edwards
• Michael Hanagan
• Maria Höhn
• Julie E. Hughes
• James Merrell
• Quincy T. Mills
• Lydia Murdoch
• Leslie Scott Offutt
• Ronald Patkus
• Michaela Pohl
• Ismail Rashid
• Joshua Schreier