Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University in New York and is a fabulous after dinner and keynote speaker. Since 1990, Simon has presented more than thirty documentaries on art and history for the BBC among them the award winning fifteen part series A History of Britain, Rough Crossings and the Emmy-winning eight-part Power of Art first broadcast in 2006. Other of his programmes include Murder at Harvard based on his novella Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculation, a five part series based on Landscape and Memory, and a film on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Most recently he has been on the UK’s TV screens with the landmark series The American Future: A History.

Born in London in 1945 he has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard Universities before going to Columbia University in 1993. His fourteen books, translated into sixteen languages from Chinese to Portuguese, include The Embarrassment of Riches, An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt’s Eyes, the History of Britain trilogy, Power of Art, and, Rough Crossings, Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize for non-fiction in the United States.

His art criticism for The New Yorker won the National magazine Award in 1996; he has written essays about the work of Christo, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, and Jenny Saville. He has written food and cooking essays for Vogue and he writes regularly for The Guardian on American politics; music and art. The American Future: A History, the book accompanying the BBC2 series, was published in October 2008.

Simon is a distinguished and gifted speaker on numerous subjects from contemporary history to politics to art.

One of the most well known historians, cultural commentators and art experts in the UK and US, Simon Schama is a powerful, inspiring and charismatic speaker who is known from his acclaimed television and literary canon.