John Ll. Edwards Lecture

Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname”

January 25, 2010 at 4:30 pm Reception to Follow

Centre of Criminology, University of Toronto 14 Queen's Park Crescent West Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K9 Event Contact: Brendan Heath: crim.grad@utoronto.ca

Natalie Zemon Davis
Professor Emerita of History at Princeton University
Adjunct Professor of History and Professor of Medieval Studies, University of Toronto

Natalie Zemon Davis is one of the world’s most influential historians. Her work has profoundly shaped how scholars use legal and other sources to shed light on power and inequality in everyday life. Her 1975 book Society and Culture in Early Modern France pioneered the study of ‘everyday life’, and took the then radical step of considering gender as a central analytical category. The 1983 book The return of Martin Guerre, released at the same time as the film, was a case study about an impostor whose identity came under legal scrutiny. How identity is constructed, in part through legal proceedings, was also the focus of a highly influential work, Fiction in the archives: pardon tales and their tellers in sixteenth-century France (1987), and of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006). In recent years Prof. Davis has expanded the scope of her research to include the slave trade, focusing especially on Suriname. In this year’s John Ll. Edwards lecture, cosponsored by the Centre of Criminology, the Faculty of Law, and Woodsworth College, Prof. Davis will share her ongoing research in a talk by the title of, “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice In Colonial Suriname”.