Simon Schama is an internationally acclaimed historian, political commentator, and art critic. He is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, and the award-winning author of seventeen books, including Rough Crossings and The Story of the Jews (the second volume, When Words Fail, will appear in 2017).

Schama is and the writer-presenter of fifty documentaries on art, history and literature for BBC2. He has written and presented more than thirty television documentaries for PBS, the BBC, and the History Channel. His art criticism for The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism in 1996, his film on Bernini, The Power of Art, won an Emmy in 2007, and his series The American Future: a History received Broadcast Critics Guild awards. He writes on cooking and food for GQ, fashion for Harper’s Bazaar, and on everything else for the Financial Times.

He curated the Government Art Collection show, Travelling Light, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and has collaborated with Anselm Kiefer, John Virtue and Cecile B. Evans on contemporary art exhibitions and installations. In the autumn of 2015, The Face of Britain, a history of British portraiture, appeared as a five-part BBC television series and as a book and an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. He is currently working on Civilisations, a television history of world art.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of about having an emotional response to the suffering of 4 million Syrian refugees.”