Profile of Simon Schama on Famous Like Me

Professor Simon Schama, MA (born February 1945) is 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.

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 relocating back to London. Schama won a scholarship to the prestigious Haberdashers' Aske's public school and went on to study history at Christ's College, Cambridge University.

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, 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 Prize for history. 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 very ambivalent critical and academic reception, 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. The series eventually ran to three series, with eighteen episodes 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.

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 only confirmed project lined up as part of the deal is a book and TV show provisionally 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 becoming a Superdon.

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 0394559487
• Dead Certainties (1991) (a novel)
• Landscape and Memory (1995)
• Rembrandt's Eyes (1999)
• A History of Britain (2000–2003)

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