In the footsteps of television history
Posted on 7 December 2010
He will give a public lecture as well as being a key speaker at a conference organised by the University’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past (IPUP). Hosted by University Chancellor Greg Dyke, it will bring together some of the people involved with making the series.
IPUP’s Director, Helen Weinstein said: “The conference will provide participants with the opportunity to think about how identity, nationhood and history are all intertwined in today’s landscape of history in the media.”
Delegates include Janice Hadlow, now Controller of BBC 2, Martin Davidson, now Commissioner for History at the BBC, and George Entwistle, BBC Knowledge Commissioner, who will talk about the future of presenting the past in the new digital era of multi-platforming. Greg Dyke was Director-General of the BBC when the programme was first broadcast.
It is really important to understand how narrative formats attract and sustain wider audiences.
Professor Helen Weinstein
The conference forms part of IPUP’s research into how the past is presented in the media in the 21st century.
“It is really important to understand how narrative formats attract and sustain wider audiences,” Professor Weinstein said. “This has implications for how we translate academic work into the public realm in the media and in museums and heritage sites.”
Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. He is the author of Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson Prize for History, The Embarrassment of Riches, Citizens which won the 1990 NCR book award for non-fiction, Dead Certainties, Landscape and Memory which won the W H Smith Literary Award in 1995, and Rembrandt's Eyes. He is well-known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He was awarded the CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours list.
Notes to editors:
- More information on the conference Televisualising the past – Simon Schama’s A History of Britain ten years at www.york.ac.uk/ipup/events/conferences/ahistoryofbritain.html
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