In Memoriam: Natalie Zemon Davis,1928-2023

Natalie Zemon Davis, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University, and a social and cultural historian, died of cancer at her home in Toronto earlier this fall. She was 94 years old.

Davis was born in Detroit in 1928. A 1949 graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, she earned her master’s degree at Radcliffe College in 1950 and her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1959. She joined the Princeton faculty after teaching at Brown University, York University, the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Davis, a 2003 recipient of the National Humanities Medal, joined Princeton’s faculty in 1978 and transferred to emeritus status in 1996. She directed the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies from 1990 to 1994 and was a founder of the Program in Women’s Studies (now the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies).

Dr. Davis was the author of several books including Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (Hill and Wang, 2006), and A Passion for History (Pennsylvania State University Press (2010).