Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the English-speaking world’s best-known and most influential historians. She is now retired, but has taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California at Berkeley, and Princeton University. Her pioneering work in the fields of social and cultural history emphasized the role of women, people of low social status, and other often marginalized and ignored figures. She is primarily a historian of early modern Europe, and her most famous work is The Return of Martin Guerre, which is considered one of the first “micro-histories”—accounts of the past that focus on the lives of individual people or communities rather than grand historical narratives.