This autumn Dr Isis Giraldo (University of Lausanne) was a visiting fellow at the Stuart Hall Archive Project. Read about her activities here:
My Vanguard Fellowship at the Stuart Hall Archive, sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Birmingham, was an extraordinary experience in time travelling. It provided me, among other things, with a unique opportunity to answer a question that had been subconsciously lingering at the back of my head since I first discovered his work as an undergrad: what were the clearly non-European political elements that so profoundly influenced Hall’s thought? One folder in the archive—titled ‘Jamaica’—proved extremely rich in this regard. This discovery fruitfully informed the paper I had been working on in preparation for my visit, which dealt with the complicated reception of his work in French academia and scholarship.
Though the visit was short, one month, it was productive. I completed my personal database on Hall/cultural studies comprising, first, all translations of his work into French, and, second, texts in/about cultural studies—not necessarily by Hall—that have been published in French since roughly the 1990s (with a couple of exceptions in the 1980s-90s). I expect this database to be soon incorporated into SHAP’s resources. A second task I accomplished, was the finishing of my own paper for the ‘Positions and Trajectories’ conference that took place at Birmingham at the end of my stay, and which benefited from the archival work. Finally, the stay offered me the opportunity to build connections with scholars— directly or indirectly involved in SHAP—via the co-organisation of a workshop on Hall from a transnational perspective. This event opened up the possibility for an on-going collaboration with a set of scholars based in Birmingham on a research project about racialised archives, Stuart Hall’s work in relation to the world, the many aspects of translation, and the global flow of ideas.