Bio: (1932-2014) British theorist of culture. Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica to a family of African and British descent. He came to Britain in 1951 to study at Oxford. Hall became the first editor-in-chief of the New Left Review in 1960, and four years later joined the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Hall became the director of the Center in 1968 and remained in that position until 1979 when he moved to the Open University, where he worked as a professor of sociology until his retirement in 1997. Hall was one of the leaders of interdisciplinary cultural studies in Britain.

As part of his cultural studies, Hall studied many cultural forms: popular music, commercials, women's magazines, youth subculture, fashion, movies, and television. He studied the relationship between politics and these cultural forms. Hall's theory was mostly influenced by Gramsci's study of the influence that culture has on politics.

Another field of study, which he focused on in the late 1970s, is the rise of authoritarianism in British politics. At the heart of these studies is the way the state has treated immigrants of African or Caribbean descent. The increase in the share of this group of immigrants in the general population has led to a conservative reaction in public and politics. This reaction was reflected in the formation of racially based ghettos. Thatcherism was the culmination of a conservative and authoritarian reaction in British politics. As a leftist, Hall believed that the left should focus on thinking about the future and ways to overcome the conservative reaction.

Main works

The Popular Arts (1964);

Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973);

Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (1976);

On Ideology (1978);

Policing the Crisis (1978);

Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies (1972–1979) (1980);

Empire Strikes Back (1982);

1880–1930: Crises in the British State (1985);

„The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.”, in  Journal of Communication Inquiry (1986);

The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988);

New Times (1990);

Formations of Modernity (1992).