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 he 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; 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,
volume 1, The Edge of the World (2000); volume 2, The British Wars,(2001) and
volume 3, The Fate of Empire (2002).
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.
In 2003, Schama signed a contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce
three new books and two accompanying TV series. The first result of the deal
was a book and TV show entitled Rough Crossings, dealing with stories of
migration across the Atlantic Ocean and including chapters/episodes on
Pocahontas, freed slaves, and the Irish famine.
In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series The Power of Art which, with the
accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to
art history for him by treating eight artists through eight key works.
