Jane Censer, Emeritus Professor of History, has been awarded the The Richard Slatten Award, which is given annually to the most outstanding book in Virginia biography. The award recognized Censer’s most recent book, The Princess of Albemarle: Amélie Rives, Author and Celebrity at the Fin de Siècle.
Censer’s book is the first major piece of scholarship on Rives, who was one of the most famous women in America at the turn of the 20th century. She was born into one of the most prominent families in Virginia and was widely recognized for her beauty. She married into the wealthy Astor family and became a best-selling author. Her life was also full of scandal and celebrity. After struggling with addiction to morphine and cocaine, she divorced her husband to marry a Russian prince and refashioned herself as a European princess. Censer’s book draws from Rives’ diaries, correspondence, and publications, as well as the voluminous press coverage she received. Censer uses this dramatic material to explore how elite women in the late nineteenth-century South navigated the expectations placed upon them.
The Richard Slatten Award was established in 1997, thanks to a generous bequest, to recognize excellence in the field of Virginia Biography. This prize, which carries a cash award of $1,000, honors the person whose work made the most significant contribution to biographical study. Censer is actually the second faculty member in our department to have won the award in the past decade; in 2012 Cynthia Kierner received the award for her biography, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times.
June 27, 2023