Biography

Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist. In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At Hoggart's invitation, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the CCCS in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979.[3] 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 such as Michel Foucault. Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University. He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997. He retired from the Open University in 1997. After his death in 2014, Stuart Hall was described as "one of the most influential intellectuals of the last sixty years".