Kelsey Rubin-Detlev wins Alexander Nove Prize for 2019 for 'The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great'

BASEES is delighted to announce that Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (University of Southern California) has won the Alexander Nove Prize for 2019 for her work The Epistolary Art of Catherine the Great (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2019). 

Judges’ citation: This is an impressive study by a first time-author.  In the Epistolatory Art of Catherine the Great, Kelsey Rubin-Detlev has provided an in-depth analysis of the correspondence practices of an eighteenth-century monarch. In the study, she has combined the management of an extremely large corpus of materials with insights from recent theorization in gender, cultural and communication studies that allows her to tell a multifaceted story of the intellectual life, image construction, personal life and statecraft of the monarch. Rubin-Deltev does an especially good job of analysing the intended audiences of the letters, and distinguishing between the truly personal, such as the love notes to Grigory Potemkin, and those targeting a broader audience in the salons of elite society, politicians at home and abroad or future generations.   The study involved the examination of no fewer than 10,000 letters in archives in five different countries and in so doing demonstrates how digitization and ‘big data’ analysis can be put to the service of the historian, in this case, allowing the visualisation of the extensive domestic and international networks the monarch forged. The book exhibits great imagination in the range of skills Rubin-Detlev  demonstrates in spanning the broad historical grasp, theorisations of the letter genre and of gender construction as well as a fine sense of nuance when teasing out subtleties of evolving word usage or cliché, the nuances of Catherine’s switching between languages, and textual detail.  All of these facets are seamlessly integrated with an engaging and imaginative writing style especially impressive in a first book.

 Jury: Prof. Judith Pallot (Christ Church, Oxford; Prof. Jeremy Hicks, Queen Mary University of London)

The Alexander Nove Prize for scholarly work of high quality in Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet studies was established by decision of the annual general meeting of the Association in March 1995 in recognition of the outstanding contribution to its field of study made by the late Alexander Nove.