Stuart Hall

Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on the third of February 1932, the youngest child of a middle-class Jamaican family. He took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1951 and never permanently returned to Jamaica.

He co-founded the Universities and Left Review in 1957 — among the journals that gave rise to the New Left in Britain — and edited the New Left Review in its first years. From 1968 to 1979 he was director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he founded what came to be called the Birmingham School — the most influential strand of cultural studies as an academic discipline, internationally.

His work spanned four decades and shaped the analysis of three things: race in modern Britain, the politics of Thatcherism, and the cultural production of identity. Policing the Crisis (1978), co-written with four collaborators, anticipated by two decades the analysis of state-driven moral panics that would dominate political discourse from 9/11 onward. His essay "Encoding/Decoding" (1973) became one of the most cited essays in twentieth-century media studies. His 1997 essay The Spectacle of the "Other" shaped a generation of work on representation and racial visibility.

He served as the editorial mentor of Marxism Today, the journal whose 1980s analysis of Thatcherism reshaped the British left. He was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in 1980s Britain. He held a professorship at the Open University from 1979 to 1997.

He died in London on the tenth of February 2014, age eighty-two.

He is honored here as the founder of British cultural studies and the Jamaican intellect who reshaped how Britain understood itself.