American historian Natalie Zemon Davis wins prestigious Holberg Prize for humanities

American historian wins Holberg Prize

OSLO — American historian Natalie Zemon Davis won Norway’s 4.5 million kroner ($785,000) Holberg International Memorial Prize on Tuesday for her narrative approach to the field of history.

The Norwegian awards committee said the 81-year-old Detroit native “shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action.”

The Holberg Prize citation praised Davis as “one of the most creative historians writing today” whose work has inspired a generation of younger historians and promoted “cross-fertilization between disciplines.”

Davis is a professor at the University of Toronto and professor emerita at Princeton University, where she taught for many years.

“I am very thrilled and honored to have been awarded the Holberg Prize and to be included in a list of such distinguished and creative scholars, whose work I have admired and learned from,” she said in comments published on the Holberg Prize Web site.

Davis, who is a leading scholar of early modern European history, described her work as “decentered” and “pluralistic” history, “where what happens in a woman’s workshop or a villager’s hut or at a printer’s press can count as much as decisions at a king’s council or a meeting of a Faculty of Theology.”

“Especially, I’ve tried to write a history of hope, where despite all the tragedy and bloodshed, the variety of life in the past fascinates us and suggests possibilities for the future,” she said.

The Holberg Prize was created in 2003 by the Norwegian government to honor work in the humanities, social sciences, law and theology. It was named in memory of Norwegian playwright and author Ludvig Holberg, who lived from 1684 to 1754. Last year’s prize went to Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.

The 2010 prize will be presented June 9 at a ceremony in Bergen, Norway.

On the Net:

www.holbergprisen.no