NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS TO DISCUSS 16th-CENTURY MUSLIM'S EUROPEAN SOJOURN IN FIRST POWELL MEMORIAL LECTURE

Natalie Zemon Davis

Eminent historian Natalie Zemon Davis will be the inaugural speaker for a new lecture series dedicated to the memory of Michael Powell, a brilliant and multitalented young scholar of medieval history and culture whose career at Bryn Mawr College was cut short by cancer in 2004. Davis' lecture, titled "Trickster Travels: A 16th-Century Muslim Between Worlds," will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 1, from 7 to 9 p.m. in Thomas Great Hall on the Bryn Mawr campus. A reception will follow in the London Room, also in Thomas. Both events are free and open to the public.

Davis is an immensely influential scholar whose work, reconstructing stories of ordinary people long considered to be inconsequential in history's grand narratives, has been praised for its creativity, its daring, and its unusual combination of high academic standards and popular appeal. She is most famous for The Return of Martin Guerre, which brought to popular and academic readers a tale of identity theft in a 16th-century French peasant community.

Michael Powell

History Department Chair Sharon Ullman sees Davis as the ideal candidate to deliver the first Powell lecture. "Michael admired Professor Davis enormously and had often spoken of trying to bring her to Bryn Mawr College," she notes. "So, when the department decided to set up a lecture series in his honor, she was our first choice for the initial invitee."

Powell, who held advanced degrees in divinity and music as well as a Ph.D. in history and medieval studies, brought an interdisciplinary approach to courses dealing with court culture, Christianity, the rise of urbanism, homosexuality and food in medieval Europe. Colleagues praised the creativity of his scholarly work, which drew on his multiple areas of expertise to provide an unusually rich and complex understanding of medieval European culture. He was equally admired for his energetic, engaging approach to teaching, and in 2003 he earned the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award.

The Department of History hopes to establish an endowment that will fund a biannual Powell lecture in perpetuity. The lectures "will address any of Michael's vast array of interests," Ullman says, "most prominently of course, medieval society and gender, but also urban studies, opera, baseball and cooking." Donations to the Powell Lecture Fund may be sent to the attention of Martha Dean, Director of Development, at the Bryn Mawr College Resources Office.

In "Trickster Travels," which is also the title of her forthcoming book, Davis revisits themes of dissimulation and cultural exchange that have long distinguished her work. The lecture will examine the life of Hassan El Wazzan, a Moroccan diplomat who, after being captured by pirates and imprisoned in Rome by Pope Leo X, converted to Christianity and penned several books about the Muslim world for a European audience. Christened Johannes Leo Africanus by the Pope, "Leo Africanus" tutored important Catholic officials in Arabic and became one of the West's most important and trusted sources of information about Africa and Islam in the early modern era. Yet there are curious gaps in the historical record about the man himself. In her lecture, Davis will reflect on the strategies he may have used in negotiating the religious and cultural boundaries between East and West.

The Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, Davis has also taught at Brown University, the University of Toronto, the University of California at Berkeley, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University and Balliol College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous books and the recipient of a number of honorary degrees from institutions in the United States and Europe, and has been hailed by the American Council of Learned Societies as "perhaps the outstanding historical lecturer of the era."

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