Simon Schama

Sir Simon Michael Schama is a British-American scholar and professor. He specializes in the history of art, the history of the Netherlands and France, and Jewish history. He produced the BBC documentary series "A History of Britain," consisting of 15 episodes. He is the author of many books and scholarly articles. In 2018, he was knighted by the Queen of England.

Simon Schama was born into a Jewish family; his mother, Gertie Steinberg, came from an Ashkenazi Jewish family from Lithuania, and his father, Arthur Schama, was a Sephardic Jew from Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey). He attended a private boys' school and then studied history at Christ's College, Cambridge. He entered Cambridge University, from which he graduated with honors in 1966.

Schama taught history at Cambridge for some time, where he was a research fellow at Christ's College. He later moved to Oxford, where in 1976 he became a fellow of Brasenose College and specialized in the history of the French Revolution. During this period, he wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which was published in 1977 and won the Wolfson Prize. A year later, his second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel, was published.

In 1980, Schama moved to the United States, where he took up a chair at Harvard University. He later became Professor of History and History of Art at Columbia University in New York.