In this informal talk, Natalie Davis will describe the impact of the Red Hunt in the United States in the 1950s on her own scholarship as a graduate student and beginning historian, especially its effect on her work on book history in early modern France.  She will also look at some other historians similarly affected by the experience of political persecution and see what consequences it had for their historical writing.  How did we cope with censorship?

Natalie Zemon Davis specializes in the social and cultural history of France, as well as other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton University, where she was Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies. On retiring from Princeton in 1996 she returned to Toronto, where she continues to live, as Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology and Professor of Medieval Studies. In 2010, she was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize as “one of the most creative historians writing today” whose work, in the wording of the award citation, “shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action.” In 2012, she was named Companion of the Order of Canada, the highest class within the order. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for “her insights into the study of history and her exacting eloquence in bringing the past into focus.” Davis’s books have all been translated into other languages: twenty-two in the case of The Return of Martin Guerre.