Natalie Zemon Davis!

The Department of History welcomes Professor Natalie Zemon Davis to campus on Friday, September 24, to speak in F210 (the Fedeli Room) at 5 p.m. 

Professor Davis' talk is titled Decentering History: Local Storytelling and Cultural Crossing in a Global World.
Speaking partly from her own experience, Professor Davis will explore ways that the practice of history has changed, examining historical comparison through local figures (a male and female writer from different parts of the world in 1400) and through cultural crossing (how techniques in healing and justice transferred from Africa to a slave colony).

Natalie Zemon Davis is among the most widely known and influential historians in the academy. Her work on the social and cultural history of early modern Europe has reached readers far outside the university setting, perhaps most famously with The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) and most recently with Trickster Travels: a Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (2008). Earlier this year she received the Holberg International Memorial Prize in recognition of her lifetime achievement.

The lecture is free of charge and all are welcome.

For further information, please contact Dr. Derek Neal in the Department of History at derekn@nipissingu.ca .

Natalie Zemon Davis will be at Nipissing University in September

Mark your calendars: the exact date is September 24.

Davis is one of the most eminent historians in Canada, or even North America as a whole today. She is famous for taking difficult sources and putting flesh on them dry bones. Perhaps her most well-known project was interpreting the story of a 16th-century French imposter, Martin Guerre -- a project that produced a book on the case itself, an article on her methodology, and
a movie recreating the story. Like many another historian teaching early modern Europe, I have sometimes used the Martin Guerre material in class. Others, I am sure, have used more recent books -- because Davis is someone interested and skilled at communicating with people who aren't scholars as well as those who are.

It's quite an honor to have Davis accept the History Department's invitation to speak. Take advantage of this opportunity to hear her if you can. More details as available.

Oh, yes, when we are talking about eminence and reaching a broader public, there is this recent honor to make the point.