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Simon Schama to Deliver Public Lecture April 29

Is historical fiction an illegitimate stepchild of history or a legitimate relative?

Historian, author and Columbia University professor Simon Schama will address that question in a lecture at the University Monday, April 29, titled "History and the Literary Imagination."

The last of three University Lectures of the academic year, it will begin at 8 P.M. in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus at Broadway and 116th Street. Admission is free and the public is invited.

In describing his forthcoming talk, he said: "Notwithstanding the essential distinction between fact and fiction, is there anything historians can learn from the approach to the past adopted by historical novelists? I will look at the rich tradition of that genre, from Walter Scott to Marguerite Yourcenar and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and the subtle negotiations undertaken by the best historical novelists, between the present and the past. Can sympathetic reading of the best works of the genre help historians to fulfill Leopold von Ranke's surprising dictum - that 'history should be treated poetically' - and make for a poetic enrichment of their practice?"

Professor Schama's writings have challenged conventional historical practice in bringing the past to vivid life. His indictment of the French Revolution in the best-selling Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (1989) shocked many, and he drew praise and controversy when he wove fiction with fact in Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (1991), about a historic battlefield death and related murder. Landscape and Memory (1995), which examines the relationship between nature and culture, was made into a five-part television series for BBC 2. An earlier book, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture (1987), examined its subject through the lens of its works of art.

The Old Dominion Professor of Humanities at Columbia since his appointment in 1993, Professor Schama teaches in both the History Department and Art History and Archaeology Department. He is art critic for The New Yorker magazine. He previously taught at Harvard University, the °cole des Hautes °tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; Brasenose College, Oxford University; and Christ's College, Cambridge University. London born, he was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he received the B.A. and M.A. in history.

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