Sylvana Tomaselli

Sylvana Palma Windsor, Countess of St Andrews is a Canadian-born academic and historian. By virtue of marriage she is a member of the House of Windsor and is related to the British royal family as the wife of George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, the eldest son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, and a second cousin of King Charles III.
She is a devout Roman Catholic. A noted historian and Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, she is also known professionally as Dr. Sylvana Tomaselli.

Early life and ancestry

Tomaselli was born on 28 May 1957 at Placentia, Newfoundland, daughter of Maximilian Karl Tomaselli by his wife, Josiane Yvonne née Preschez.
By birth, Sylvana belongs to an Austrian branch of the Tomaselli family, an ancient Italian noble family of condotieri and feudal lords, whose origins are in Piacenza, Northern Italy.
Members of her family later rose to prominent positions in both Kingdom of Italy and the Austrian Empire.
Tomaselli was educated in Canada and England.

Marriages and family

She married firstly, on 25 December 1977 at Vancouver, John Paul Jones, son of Captain Geoffrey Jones of Barbados, but they divorced in 1981 without children.
She married secondly, on 9 January 1988 at Leith in Scotland, George, Earl of St Andrews. The marriage was a civil ceremony rather than one at a church as the bride was a divorcée, and she opted for a royal blue polka-dot velvet suit with matching cossack-style hat as her wedding outfit. She changed into a more bridal look with a calot and a pouf of net veil for the wedding reception. They have three children:

Lady Saint Andrews' Roman Catholicism no longer precludes her husband's succession to the throne. Two of her children, Edward and Marina, were received into the Roman Catholic Church, thereby surrendering their places in the line of succession to the thrones of the Commonwealth realms, although Lord and Lady St Andrews' younger daughter, Amelia, is Protestant and is still in remainder to the British Crown.

Academic career

Tomaselli, who received BA, MA and MA and PhD degrees, became a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 2004. She specialises in French and British political theory in the 18th century, especially the history of womanhood, and has written about John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. She is the translator of Book II of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. She teaches the three History of Political Theory Papers and is an affiliated Lecturer of the Faculties of History as well as of Social and Political Sciences.
She is a founding member of the European Centre for the Philosophy of Gender, Siegen, Germany, and is currently Director of Studies in History and Social & Political Sciences at St John's College in the University of Cambridge, and a tutor for postgraduates.
Tomaselli was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2015.