Simon Schama

Simon Schama studied history at Cambridge University where from 1966 to 1976 he was Fellow of Christ’s College. From 1976 to 1980 he was Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford. From 1980 to 1993 he was Professor of History, Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences and William Kenan Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and Senior Associate of the Center for European Studies. He has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; and has been the Trevelyan Lecturer at Cambridge University, and the Tanner Lecturer at both Oxford (on Rubens and Rembrandt) and Harvard Universities , 2002: ("Random Access Memory: History in the Digital Age). In 2001 he delivered the Finzi Contini Lecture at Yale "English History: In Defence of the Epic" and in June 2002 was the Phi Beta Kappa Orator at Harvard ("The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of the Osbournes", published in The New Republic).

He is author of Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (1977) which won the Wolfson Prize for History; Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1979); The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987); Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) for which he received the major non-fiction prize in the UK, the NCR Prize; the historical novel Dead Certainties (1991) now the subject of a PBS film for The American Experience (to be broadcast in the summer of 2003); Landscape and Memory (1995) the winner of the W.H. Smith Literary Award; and the student-voted Lionel Trilling Prize at Columbia; Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999); and the trilogy, A History of Britain vol I The Edge of the World (2000); volume 2 The British Wars ,( 2001) and volume 3 The Fate of Empire, (2002). He is currently at work on a book about arguments in the transatlantic relationship.

Simon Schama has been a regular contributor to The New Republic; The New York Review of Books; The Guardian, and since 1994, art and cultural critic for The New Yorker, winning a National Magazine Award for his art criticism in 1996. His criticism has been published in Dutch as Kunstzaken (1998) and in Spanish (2002) as Confesiones y Encargos. His books have been translated into eleven languages. He has received a literature award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters; and in 2001 was made a Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honour List.

His television work as writer and presenter for the BBC includes, Art of the Western World; Rembrandt: The Public Gaze and the Private Eye; a five part Series based on Landscape and Memory; and most recently an award-winning 15 part History of Britain which drew four million viewers in the U.K and was shown in the United States on the History Channel. A new eight part series for the BBC, The Power of Art, will begin filming in the summer of 2004.

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