Central European - 8 month ago

In March, CEU’s Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures, hosted by the university’s Department of Historical Studies, will feature Lorraine Daston, Director emerita at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Daston will present her current work on the history of diversity as a value in her series of Vienna talks: “Diversity as Beauty” on March 10, “Diversity as Efficiency” on March 11 and “Diversity as Justice” on March 13.   Since its launch in 2006, CEU’s annual Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures have featured a world-famous historian invited to discuss their current research topic. The annual lecture series is published as a book by CEU Press.   Daston has written broadly on topics in the history of science, including probability, wonders, objectivity and observation. Her most recent book is: “Rivals: How Scientists Learned to Cooperate” (2023). Following her studies at Harvard and Cambridge University, she taught at Princeton, Harvard, Brandeis, Chicago and Göttingen universities, before becoming one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science from 1995 until her retirement in 2019.   Remembering Natalie Zemon Davis  It was at Princeton University where Daston first encountered Davis, who was a professor there when Daston was an assistant professor. “When I arrived in 1983, there were three women assistant professors, a novelty for the still overwhelmingly male Princeton history department, and Natalie took us under her wing. I can still remember her gently coaching us before we delivered a lecture in her class,” said Daston, who was precepting Davis’s course at the time. “I never give a talk without hearing Natalie s voice in my ear, and I am honored to be giving the lectures in Vienna named for Natalie,” said Daston.  Davis, who died in October of 2023, began her association with CEU in 1998 when the university invited her to a panel discussion at the City Hall of Budapest. In 2000, former President and Rector Yehuda Elkana invited her to become a member of CEU s Board of Trustees, where she served from 2001-2006. Toward the end of Davis’s board tenure, the lecture series was established, and in 2007, she received an honorary doctorate from the university.   “She [Davis] was such an inspiration for her combination of brilliance and kindness, remembered gratefully and affectionately by not only colleagues, but also by generations of students. Her work was a model of microhistory at its finest,” said Daston. “She could take an apparently isolated, local historical episode and use it as a microcosm of immense problems that otherwise would have been impossible to grapple with historically.”  Daston cited how Davis’s text “The Return of Martin Guerre”, for example, uniquely illuminated the problem of personal identity in an age without identity documents of any kind. “I ve taught a course on the classics of history at the University of Chicago, and this was always on the reading list. She [Davis] deserves to keep company with authors of other classics of the discipline, such as Thucydides and Herodotus and Machiavelli,” said Daston.  The Value of Diversity   Daston’s Vienna lectures will bring together her historical research on diversity as a value and examine how this value has become established as a deeply moral intuition. She said: “In my lifetime, I have witnessed on many fronts what I would call moral progress with the establishment of new values.” Daston said that she found diversity particularly worthy of historical inquiry because it established itself as a viscerally felt moral intuition with startling speed, compared to the centuries needed to promote other values to that status.   The first lecture, “Diversity as Beauty”, begins with ideas from “The Natural History” by Pliny the Elder, which praises the diversity of flowers as the glorious extravagance of nature at play, serving no purpose other than beauty for its own sake. The talk will explore how the value of diversity was associated with magnificent excess found both in nature as well as at royal courts.  The second lecture, “Diversity as Efficiency”, will take place at the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien. Here, Daston will describe how diversity became an economic value related to the division of labor. She will also discuss how Charles Darwin translated diversity, seen as efficiency and utility in the economic realm, to the divergence of organisms in nature, each specialized to its ecological niche. This talk will be followed by a discussion with Frank Zachos, Curator at the Naturhistorische Museum Wien, moderated by Katrin Vohland, Director of the Naturhistorische Museum Wien.  Closing the series, the third lecture, “Diversity as Justice”, takes as its departure point post-Apartheid South Africa’s rebirth as a “rainbow nation” in the 1990s. Since then, Daston observes in her research, diversity has become a moral and political value that reconceived justice as inclusion. “In the lightning establishment of diversity as a value, we can see the way in which the much older associations of diversity – first as an aesthetic value, then as an economic value – paved the way for diversity in its newest incarnation as a political value,” said Daston. She added that the talks are not a story of one value replacing another but rather of a “stratigraphy of values,” with one sense of diversity as a value layered upon the next one.   Daston’s work has been recognized by the Pfizer Book Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Dan David Prize for the History of Science, the Gerda Henkel Foundation Prize in the Humanities, the Heineken Prize for History of the Royal Netherlands Academy and the Balzan Prize. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Leopoldina National Academy of Germany, and corresponding member of the British Academy.  Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures 2025:   Diversity as Beauty, March 10, CEU  Diversity as Efficiency, March 11, Naturhistorisches Museum Wien  Diversity as Justice, March 13, CEU      Unit: Department of Historical StudiesResearch Area: History and Medieval StudiesCategory: NewsImage: Content Priority: High

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