Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-British academic, writer, cultural studies pioneer, public intellectual and teacher who was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932 and died in London aged 82 in February 2014. As a public intellectual Hall made major interventions in the cultural and political life of Britain, and his influence has continued, with interest in his life and work growing locally and internationally.
Hall’s intellectual work has had profound consequences, for the field of cultural studies, and the humanities and social sciences more broadly. Grounding enquiries into popular arts and culture in political and economic conditions, Hall provided means by which subordination, exploitation, and marginalisation, enacted through class, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationhood can be addressed, identifying and responding to new social and cultural formations.
Hall worked across organisations, institutions, networks and campaigns, in a diversity of event, print and broadcast media to engage in a dialogue with equally diverse constituencies: Hall was an exemplar public intellectual. His politics and research were informed and developed through distinctive pedagogical practices in extra-mural, secondary, and tertiary contexts. His life and work provide an exceptional opportunity for the development of the distinctive kind of ‘public sphere’ he had identified as necessary if the crises of the present—political, social, cultural and environmental—are to be addressed.
Hall’s papers were deposited at the Cadbury Research Library in 2018 and opened in 2019. Consisting of 89 boxes, containing representative material—in the form of papers, including unpublished reports, essays, scripts and speeches; teaching material; correspondence; editorial material; notes; ephemera and cuttings; and both audio recordings and video cassettes; covering a period from c.1950 to c.2010—the archive is a unique resource.
The aim of the Stuart Hall Archive Project is to use this archive to forge a new space for dialogue between Hall’s intellectual and political legacy and contemporary questions arising from present constituencies and communities; and to explore the history of his intellectual and political formation and development at specific conjunctures.
Project Aims
Using the papers of Stuart Hall, deposited at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, the Stuart Hall Archive Project has two inter-related research aims:
- to forge a new space for dialogue between Hall’s intellectual and political legacy and contemporary questions arising from present constituencies and communities using the archive as a catalyst;
- to explore the history of his intellectual and political formation and development at specific conjunctures as that is evident in the archive.
These aims are supported by the following objectives:
1) Conjunctures: To develop a programme of engagement with the ‘extended Caribbean’, cultural and social diasporas, and minoritized communities, that platforms new questions, knowledges, practices, and pedagogies. Led by Prof Pat Noxolo with Rita Gayle.
2) Dialogues: To digitise the archive and to develop new methods of engagement with the materials to make those more accessible and to introduce new questions of historical and contemporary relevance. Led by Rebecca Roach with Katy Parsons.
3) Readings: To recover previously unpublished or under-appreciated work by Stuart Hall and situate that work in his intellectual and political formation and development. Led by Nick Beech.
A key outcome of the research is to establish a permanent platform for further research and public outreach that extends Stuart Hall’s legacy in Birmingham and beyond.