Stuart
Hall, the son of an accountant, was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932.
He moved to England with his mother in 1951. They lived in Bristol
before Hall took his place at Oxford University.
A
socialist, in the 1950s he joined forces with E.
P. Thompson,
Raphael
Samuel, Ralph
Miliband, Raymond
Williams
and John Saville to launch
two radical journals, The New Reasoner
and the New Left Review.
In
1957 Hall joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
(CND). Other members included J. B. Priestley,
Bertrand Russell, E.
P. Thompson,
Fenner Brockway, Frank
Allaun, Donald Soper, Vera
Brittain, Sydney Silverman, James
Cameron, Jennie Lee, Victor
Gollancz, Konni
Zilliacus,
Richard Acland, Frank
Cousins, A. J. P. Taylor, Canon
John Collins and Michael Foot.
Hall worked as a supply
teacher in Brixton, edited the New Left Review
(1959-1961) and taught media studies at Chelsea College.
In 1964 he co-wrote The
Popular Arts. This resulted in him being invited by Richard
Hoggart to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham University.
In 1968 Hall became director
of the Contemporary Cultural Studies unit. Over the next few years
he wrote several books including Situating
Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972), Encoding
and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973), Reading
of Max's 1857 Introduction to the Grundrise (1973) and
Policing the Crisis (1978).
In 1979 Hall was appointed
as professor of sociology at the Open University. Other books by Hall
include The Hard Road to Renewal
(1988), Resistance Through Rituals
(1989), Modernity and Its Future
(1992), The Formation of Modernity
(1992), Questions of Cultural Identity
(1996), Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices (1997) and Visual Cultural
(1999)
Hall retired from the
Open University in 1997 and currently sits on the Runnymede Trust's
commission on the future of multi-ethnic Britain.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
