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As part of the College’s yearlong celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s birth, art critic, historian, and award-winning author Simon Schama will speak this fall. Schama’s lecture completes the fall lineup of speakers in the celebration’s Lives of Liberty series.
The series will include distinguished scholars whose work deals with the Marquis’ life or the times in which he lived. David McCullough, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his biographies of Harry S Truman and John Adams, will kick off the series with a keynote talk 8 p.m. Sept. 5 in Kamine Gymnasium. Ron Chernow, recipient of the inaugural George Washington Book Prize for his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, will speak 4:15 p.m. Oct. 19 in the Williams Center for the Arts.
In the spring, the lecture series will feature speakers whose lives embody the ideals of Lafayette in the world today. Speakers’ names and dates will be announced.
Other major events include a historical exhibit, entitled A Son and his Adoptive Father: The Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington, and a birthday party, on Sept. 6, that will include a talk by Lloyd Kramer, author of Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolution.
Schama’s lecture will focus on his latest book Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2006). The book tells the story of tens of thousands of slaves, who during the Revolutionary War, escaped from American farms, plantations and cities to fight for the British, as England was in the process of abolishing slavery. The work also chronicles the voyage many of the former slaves made to settlements in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
Schama’s research and teaching focus on European cultural and environmental history and the history of art. He is a professor in the department of art history and archeology at Columbia University and received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Cambridge University. In 2001, he was made a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
His first book, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (1977), won the United Kingdom’s Wolfson Prize for History. Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) received the UK’s NCR Book Award for non-fiction. In 1995, Landscape and Memory won the W.H. Smith Literary Award, which celebrates the most outstanding contributions to literature by a UK citizen.
He is also the author of Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1979); The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987); Dead Certainties (1991); Rembrandt’s Eyes (1999); the trilogy, A History of Britain vol I The Edge of the World (2000), volume 2 The British Wars (2001), and volume 3 The Fate of Empire (2002); and Hang-Ups: A Collection of Essays on Art (2004).
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 television work as writer and host for the BBC includes Art of the Western World; Rembrandt: The Public Gaze and the Private Eye; a five-part series based on Landscape and Memory; an eight-part series, The Power of Art; and the award-winning, 15-part History of Britain, which also ran on the History Channel.