Dia Rasinariu talks to an award-winning historian who made her name highlighting history’s forgotten:
Natalie Zemon Davis will be awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize on June 9 for the way in which her work “shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action.”
Davis describes her work as anthropological in nature. Rather than tell the political story of a time and place, concentrating on an elite narrative, Davis’ work is often from the point of view of those less likely to keep records of their lives. TAP spoke with Davis, an 81-year-old professor emerita of history at Princeton University and current adjunct professor of history at the University of Toronto, about her innovative approach to history.
You’re known for focusing your research on subjects that are not frequently studied, such as the lives of individual women or members of the working class. What motivated you to study these subjects, and what are the difficulties unique to conducting this type of research?
One, I had my own background. I was from a Jewish family, not recent immigrants, but we were not from an elite American family. I myself had the experience of being what you might call part of an unstudied group. That was the first thing.
In high school, I was already very interested in the great ideals of the French Revolution, enlightenment, democracy, and so on. By the time I was in college, I was very interested in liberal left politics, and that made me interested, not exclusively in working-class people but in things that had to do with the people.