Simon Schama

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Schama speaking at Strand Bookstore, New York City 2006

Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is a University Professor in history and art history at Columbia University. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes, and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He was an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker.

1 Biography
2 Prizes
3 Books
4 External links

[edit] Biography

The son of second-generation immigrant Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania and Turkey, Schama was born in London in February 1945; in the late 1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama won a scholarship to the prestigious Haberdashers' Aske's public school and went on to Christ's College, Cambridge studying history under J. H. Plumb.

Simon Schama

While working on and off as a lecturer in history at Cambridge and Oxford Universities throughout the 1970s, specialising in the French revolution, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators (book), originally intended as a study of the revolution but eventually published in 1979 focussing on the effect of the revolution in Holland. The book won the Wolfson History Prize. In 1980 Schama accepted the offer of a professorship at Harvard University, and wrote several important books in the 1980s; Two Rothschilds and The Embarrassment of Riches (1987) again focussed on Dutch history, while Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution.

Citizens was very well-received and sold admirably, and Schama's confidence grew; in 1991, he published the strange Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), a slender, novella-type work which looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart and mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases. It received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception (Australia's Keith Windschuttle, in his The Killing of History, took particular exception to the book's overt fictionalizing), and sold poorly.

In 1995, Schama produced another daring book, Landscape and Memory, focussed on the relationship between the physical environment of a given area and the collective folk memory and characteristics of its people. The book, while in many ways appearing even more personal and self-indulgent in its approaches than Dead Certainties, was also more traditionally structured and well-defined in its approach, and while many of the reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes.

Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than the field of traditional academia, a reception borne out when Schama became art critic for The New Yorker magazine in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with his professorial duties at Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was released in 2005 under the title Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated, full-length biography of Rembrandt van Rijn, Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success.

The year 2000 saw Schama finally return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain (Schama was insistent on the title beginning with "A" rather than "The", so as to underline that his was a personal subjective view rather than an academic, didactic standard). Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular but never patronising style, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by other historians about Schama's recounting of British Isles' history, particularly those specializing in the history of pre-Anglo, Celtic civilizations.[1] The series eventually ran to three series, with 15 episodes[2] produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until 1965, and went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there is some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the History Channel. In 2001 he was made a CBE.

In 2003, Schama signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around $5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. 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 effect making him a Superdon.

In October 2006 the BBC will broadcast a new TV series The Power of Art with accompanying book both presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, through treating 8 artists through 8 key works (Caravaggio's The Beheading of John the Baptist, Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, Rembrandt's Conspiracy of Julius Civilis,Jacques-Louis David, J. M. W. Turner, Vincent van Gogh, Picasso's Guernica, and Mark Rothko)[3]

[edit] Prizes

1977 Wolfson History Prize

[edit] Books

Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813 (1977)
Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978)
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987)
Simon Schama (March 1, 1989). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Alfred A Knopf, New York City. ISBN 0-394-55948-7.
Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991)
Landscape and Memory (1995)
Rembrandt's Eyes (1999)
A History of Britain Vol. I (2000, ISBN 0-563-48714-3)
A History of Britain Vol. II (2001, ISBN 0-563-48718-6)
A History of Britain Vol. III (2002, ISBN 0-563-48719-4)
Rough Crossings (2005, ISBN 0-06-053916-X)