We are very pleased that the Natalie Zemon Davis Memorial Lectures in 2026 will be given by Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her lecture series is entitled Historical Accompaniment as Method. It will draw on clinical records, correspondence, reports, budgets, and diaries, using both speculation and microhistory to explore sovereignty, empire, and partition from the 1830s to the 1950s.
Each lecture will provide an intimate portrait of a historical actor, their friendships, illnesses, desires, ambitions, successes and failures. Through this, the series offers new accounts of subjectivity and collectivity in what we know as the Middle East and North Africa. Traveling through Darfur, Khartoum, Cairo, Jerusalem, Acre, Haifa, Beirut, and Damascus, Prof. Seikaly proposes “historical accompaniment” as a method to study how actors and places long understood as marginal shaped global history.
The lectures will take place as follows: