| Biography | Stuart McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. He was President of the British Sociological Association 199597.
In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as director of the Centre in 1968, and remained there until 1979. While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists.
Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University. Hall retired from the Open University in 1997 and was a Professor Emeritus. British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists". He was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London. |