After the sad passing of Natalie Zemon Davies late year, the lecture series has been renamed in her memory. It will continue to engage with topics that engaged her scholarship and inspired generations of historians. The final event of this year’s series will be a roundtable in her honor.
Natalie Davis's commitment to recovering the voices of marginalised social groups underpinned her work and ethos as a historian. Resourceful and resilient, she sought out sources that allowed dialogue with people's choices, hopes and experiences, and the narratives woven around them. Much of her brilliance came from this political engagement and from lifelong conversations with her subjects, in which she allowed the women and men of the past to challenge her understanding of the period and to add their perspectives to the historian's account, sometimes foregoing any conclusion but rather initiating a new research effort, raising new questions or advancing informed speculation. This roundtable will celebrate Davis's unique craft as a scholar and assess her rich legacy.
The roundtable will be followed by a reception on CEU campus.
Ulinka Rublack was born in Tübingen in 1967 and discovered the work of Natalie Davis while studying history, art history and sociology in Hamburg and Cambridge. She completed her doctorate at Cambridge and has been a lecturer in Cambridge History since 1996. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2017. In 2018, the Humboldt and Thyssen Foundations jointly awarded her a lifetime achievement award for outstanding research and the promotion of academic exchange, the Reimar Lüst Prize. In 2019, her work as a historian and her book The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler's Defence of His Mother were recognized with Germany's most prestigious award for historians, the Deutscher Historikerpreis. Rublack has published widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture and on methodological issues. Her books have been translated into six languages, including Arabic and Chinese, and her book on Johannes and Katharina Kepler has inspired a novel, a film and a new monument to Katharina. Rublack's latest book is Dürer's Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World (2023); out in German as Dürer in der Zeit der Wunder: Kunst und Gesellschaft an der Schwelle zu einer globalen Welt (2024).