Catherine Hall


Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race and empire. She was elected fellow of British Academy in 2018, and received an honorary degree from University of York in 2019. She rejected the Dan David Prize in 2014, out of support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-movement. She is the widow of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall.

Biography

Hall was born Catherine Barrett in 1946 in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Her father, John Barrett, was a Baptist minister, while her mother, Gladys came from a family of millers. In the early 1960s, while on a march for Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Hall would meet her future husband, Professor Stuart Hall, and the two would go on to marry in 1964. The couple had a daughter, Becky, and son, Jess, and the family lived in Birmingham. In 1970 Hall attended the UK's first National Women's Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford. She also became a member of the Feminist Review collective between 1981–1997. Her husband, Stuart, with whom she travelled, died in 2014.
Supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-movement in 2014, she rejected the award of the Dan David Prize from the Dan David Foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel. Hall stated that it was "an independent political choice" to reject the award which included a £225,000 research fund. In July 2018 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy and in 2019 received an honorary degree from the University of York.