About:
Natalie Zemon Davis has expanded the boundaries of our discipline through more than half a century of path-breaking scholarship. Born in Detroit in 1928, she received her B.A. from Smith College, her M.A. from Radcliffe, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She married the mathematician Chandler Davis in 1948. Together they raised three children while pursuing busy academic careers. Natalie Davis taught at Brown and the University of Toronto before becoming a Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972 and then at Princeton from 1978 to 1996. On her retirement, she returned to Toronto, where Chandler Davis had maintained his career, and continued to work with students and colleagues as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto.
Natalie Davis’s 1959 dissertation, “Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyons,” was a pioneering work of social history that moved beyond theories of economics and class to consider the cultural, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of religious choice. Davis continued to focus on groups usually left to the margins of historical writing as she sought to recover the experience of workers, women, and peasants in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1975) and The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a work subsequently translated into at least twenty-two languages.
The Natalie Zemon Davis Award
Next Award Deadline: 15 May 2024
The Society for French Historical Studies confers the Natalie Zemon Davis Award on the best paper presented at the annual meeting of SFHS at Hofstra University by a graduate student enrolled in a doctoral program in the United States or Canada. The award honors Professor Natalie Zemon Davis for her outstanding work as a mentor of graduate students and was established through donations from students and colleagues of Professor Davis and from other members of SFHS.
Submissions should not exceed 14 pages, should be double-spaced, and must include all appropriate citation and bibliographical information. Please send your paper as a Microsoft Word or PDF attachment to the chair of the committee on or before May 15, 2024.
Please submit your paper to the 2024 chair of the SFHS Prizes & Awards Committee, Rachel Gillett (r.a.gillett@uu.nl) and for administrative purposes, please copy Tabetha Ewing (sfhsexecdir@gmail.com)
Committee Members:
Rachel Gillett, chair (2024)
Department of History and Art History
Utrecht University
3512 BS Utrecht (NETHERLANDS)
r.a.gillett@uu.nl
Kathleen Wellman (2025)
Clements Department of History
Southern Methodist University
Dallas Hall
3225 University
Dallas, TX 75205 (USA)
kwellman@smu.edu
Allan Tulchin (2026)
Department of History and Philosophy
Shippensburg University
1871 Old Main Dr.
Shippensburg, PA 17257
aatulchin@ship.edu
Kelly Colvin (2026)
Department of History
UMass Boston
McCormack Hall
100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125-3393
Kelly.Colvin@umb.edu
Kathleen Kete (2027)
Department of History
Trinity College
Seabury Hall N-401
300 Summit Street, Hartford CT 06106
Past Winners:
2023:
Patrick Travens, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Jacobinism, Commerce, and Empire in Revolutionary Bordeaux.”
2022:
Nicholas O’Neill, University of Chicago, “Accounting for Taste: Consumption, Value, and the Adoption of Double-Entry Bookkeeping.”
2021:
No award was made because the conference was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020:
Matthew McDonald, Princeton, “Language, de luxe: The Uses of Style in Eighteenth-Century European French,” available online here.
2019:
Steven Weber, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, “French Papers, English Politics: Depictions and Translations of Parliamentary Politics and French Political Thought in the 1770s.”
Honorable mention: Nicholas O’Neill, University of Chicago, “Between Merchants and Manufactures: Cultural Authority in the Transition from Merchant to Industrial Capitalism.”
2018:
Joseph la Hausse de Lalouvière, Harvard University, “To Turn an Eye Blind: Testimony and Human Property in the Illegal French Slave Trade.”
2017:
Katlyn Carter, Princeton University, “Trying the King in the Name of the People: The Appel au Peuple and Political Representation.”
2016:
Jillian Slaight, University of Wisconsin, Madison, "'Old Girls': Sexual Immaturity as a Standard of Innocence in Eighteenth-Century French Justice."
2015:
Sebastien Doederlein, Concordia University, "Not so Republican After All: Expectations and Disappointments in Alsace-Lorraine Before and After November 11, 1918."
2014:
Katie Jarvis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, "'Patriotic Discipline': Cloistered Behinds, Public Judgment, and Female Violence in Revolutionary Paris."
2013:
Angela Haas, Binghamton University, "Dubious Relics, Unknown Saints, and the Evolution of Lay Piety in Eighteenth-Century France."
2012:
Carolyn Purnell, University of Chicago, "Instrumental Feeling: The Stable Characteristics of Sensibility, 1740-1789."
2011:
James Naus, Saint Louis University, for "Dynastic Legitimization in Twelfth-Century France."
2010:
Marie-Eve Chagnon, Concordia University, “L’internationalisme scientifique face à la Grande Guerre : la rupture des relations de la science française et allemande (1914-1919)."
2009:
Alexia Yates, University of Chicago, "The Business of Housing: Real Estate in Turn-of-the Century Paris."