Amanda Foreman

Amanda Lucy Foreman (born 1968) is a British/American biographer and historian. Her books include Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, A World on Fire, and The World Made by Women. She also wrote and starred in a four-part documentary regarding the role of women in society, entitled The Ascent of Woman. Currently, she is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal bi-weekly 'Historically Speaking' and an Honorary Research Senior Fellow in the History Department at the University of Liverpool. Family Foreman was born in London. Her parents were Evelyn (Smith) and the screenwriter and film producer Carl Foreman (1914–1984). Her father moved to England to work after being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios during the McCarthyism of the 1950s. Her brother, Jonathan Foreman, is an international correspondent and film critic. She has five children and is married to Jonathan Barton. Education Amanda Foreman was educated at Hanford School, a girls' junior independent school in southwest England, followed by various girls' boarding schools. She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, then Columbia University, before returning to England in 1991. She was awarded a 1993 Henrietta Jex-Blake Senior Scholarship at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. At Oxford, Foreman completed an MPhil thesis Politics or Providence?: Why the Houses of Parliament voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807 (1993) and a DPhil with her thesis The political life of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1757–1806 (1998) which was then turned into her first biography. She received her doctorate from Oxford University in 18th Century British History.