Welcome to the fourth week of York St John University Geography’s Black History Month blog posts, celebrating black landscapes, people, and histories in geography and the environment! This week, we are spotlighting scholars who have contributed to geography, starting with Stuart McPhail Hall.
Stuart Hall. Credit: The Open University. Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). https://www.flickr.com/photos/the-open-university/15587677477/
Stuart McPhail Hall (1932-2014) was a Jamaican-British scholar whose pioneering cultural studies works is a great influence on contemporary cultural geography.
At the age of 11, he won a scholarship to Jamaica College, a top secondary school in Jamaica. In 1951, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, the University of Oxford where he obtained a MA in English. Influenced by observed class disparity in Jamaica, the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he moved away from the study of literature to explore social theories. In about 1957, he founded the Universities and Left Review, a journal centred on a rejection of the dominant ‘revisionist’ orthodoxy in British politics.
In 1960, the journal was merged with New Reasoner to form the influential New Left Review with Stuart Hall as the founding editor. He joined the University of Birmingham in 1964 and in 1979 he became a professor of sociology at the Open University. From 1995-1997, he was the president of the British Sociological Association. In 2005, he was elected fellow of the British Academy and in 2008, he received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture. Stuart Hall is regarded as one of Britain’s leading cultural theorists.