\n<\/p>\n
Professor Davis published two books in 2000. \u201cThe Gift in Sixteenth-Century France\u201d is an anthropological look at how gift-giving and reciprocal obligation helped structure society, and \u201cSlaves on Screen\u201d examined the portrayal of slavery, and resistance to it, in five movies, from \u201cSpartacus\u201d (1960), set in ancient Rome, to \u201cBeloved\u201d (1980), an adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel rooted in the American South. Professor Davis said history films offered \u201cthought experiments\u201d about the past, but she criticized their use of fictions that misled viewers.<\/p>\n
After 2001, Professor Davis turned her attention to researching a 16th-century diplomat for the sultan of Fez, al-Hasan al-Wazzan al-Gharnati al-Fasi, who was kidnapped by Christian pirates in 1518 and taken to Rome. He converted to Christianity and lived there for nine years, writing books for Europeans in Italian and Latin about North Africa and Islam, most familiarly under the name Leo Africanus. He was best known as the author of the first geography of Africa published in Europe, in 1550.<\/p>\n
Her resulting book, \u201cTrickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds,\u201d was published in 2006.<\/p>\n
Africanus, Professor Davis said, had a \u201cdouble identity and vision, a Muslim curious about Christianity, a North African interested in exploring the world of Rome and Italy.\u201d But hard documentation about him was sparse; to figure him out, she said, she had to develop \u201ca plausible life story from materials of the time.\u201d As she had in the case of Martin Guerre, she speculated about Africanus\u2019s behavior based on the practices in the world from which he came.<\/p>\n
Natalie Zemon was born in Detroit on Nov. 8, 1928, to Julian and Helen (Lamport) Zemon, both American-born children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. Her father worked in the textile business, and her mother was a homemaker. Natalie was one of only a few Jews at Cranbrook Kingswood, a girls\u2019 finishing school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Although she was popular and successful there, she felt like an outsider, by her account. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n