Natalie Zemon Davis

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A foremost practitioner of the "new social history," Dr. Davis engaged in almost anthropological research into the lives of the artisans, labourers, and peasants of 16th-century France, resulting in such works as The Return of Martin Guerre (1983). Dr. Davis was educated at Smith College, Radcliffe College, and the University of Michigan, from which she received her PhD in 1959. She has taught at Brown University; at the University of Toronto (where with Jill Ker Conway she founded one of the first courses in history of women to be taught in North America); the University of California at Berkeley; at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris; and, after 1978, at Princeton University, where she became the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. Now professor emeritus from Princeton, she is currently adjunct professor of History and Anthropology, senior fellow in Comparative Literature, and professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Davis has been awarded honorary degrees from the Université de Lyon II, the Universität Osnabrück, Cambridge University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the University of Toronto, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Harvard University among other North American institutions.

Pages >> Biographical Notes | Address to Convocation | Oration