Nils Klim Prize laureateJohan Östling together with Natalie Zemon Davis, Holberg Prize laureate 2010. Photo: Scanpix/Holbergprisen

- I like to think of historians from many lands indulging in their own practices of peace-making in the second decade of the twenty first century. Not to delineate separate spaces from each other or conceal their views, but rather to work frankly toward forms of common knowledge. One such endeavour has already begun: the collaboration over the last decade among a new generation of Turkish and Armenian historians, living in Turkey, North America, and elsewhere to review and add to the documentary evidence on what all in the group regard as state-sponsored ethnic cleansing of the Armenians in 1915, and many in the group characterize as genocide according to the United Nations’ definition, said Natalie Zemon Davis in her award speech.