Obituary > Susan Conner (1947-2020)
We are very sad to announce that Dr Susan Conner, scholar of Napoleon and friend of the Fondation Napoléon, died of throat cancer on 28 November 2020.
She was born and reared in Madison, Wisconsin until 1959. Graduating from Armstrong State College (Georgia), magna cum laude, in 1969, she began her master’s and doctoral studies in 1972, at the Institute for Napoleon and the French Revolution at Florida State University under Donald D. Horward.
She was awarded an NDEA Fellowship and other grants, and spent nearly six months in France on her dissertation research on Laure Junot, Duchesse d’Abrantès. She then went on to have a distinguished academic career first as a tenured professor at Tift College in Forsyth, Georgia, and then at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan where she was named Professor of History emerita and joined the ranks of the administration as Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Social & Behavioral Science. She continued her career as Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida, and Provost and Professor of History at Albion College in Albion, Michigan from which she retired in 2014. Though she published widely, including the book, The Age of Napoleon (2004), she was also recognised for teaching excellence. She was a conscientious director of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era and sat on the boards of the Masséna Society (alongside Victor André Masséna Prince d’Essling and Peter Hicks) and of the Napoleonic Historical Society.
Victor-André Masséna, Thierry Lentz, Peter Hicks and the entire Fondation Napoléon team sends it sincere condolences to Ronald J. Conner, her husband of fifty-two years, and all her family, friends and colleagues. She will be sorely missed.
10 December 2020
