Catherine Hall

Catherine Hall (born 1946) 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 Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire.

Early life and education Catherine Barrett (later Hall) was born in 1946 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, England. Her father, John Barrett, was a Baptist minister, while her mother, Gladys, came from a family of millers. Her parents met at Oxford University, where Gladys was studying history. When Catherine was three years old, the family moved to Leeds, Yorkshire, and she grew up there in a non-conformist household; both parents were "radical Labour". She went to grammar school, where she says she had an excellent education.

Academic career Hall is a feminist historian, known for her work on gender, class, race and empire between 1700 and 1900.

, she is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at UCL and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, on which she has worked since 2009.

Awards and recognition 2002: Morris D. Forkosch Prize in British History from the American Historical Association 2016: Offered the Dan David Prize from the Dan David Foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel, which included a £225,000 research fund; however, in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in, Hall rejected the award, stating that it was "an independent political choice" to do so. 2018: elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) 2019: Honorary degree from the University of York 2021: Leverhulme Medal, awarded by the British Academy "in recognition of Professor Hall's impact across modern and contemporary British history, particularly in the fields of class, gender, empire and postcolonial history" 2024: Medlicott Medal, awarded by the Historical Association

Personal life Hall met her future husband, cultural theorist and activist Stuart Hall, on a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march in the early 1960s, 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, England. Stuart was Jamaican, and with mixed-race children, Catherine was aware of the legacy of British colonialism before commencing her academic work on the topic. In May 2016, Hall donated 3,000 books from his library to Housmans bookshop.

Published works

Books Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987, new edition 2002; with Leonore Davidoff) White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism And History (1992) Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000; editor, with Ida Blom and Karen Hagemann) Defining The Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (2000; editor, with Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall) Cultures of Empire: Colonisers in Britain and the Empire in Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000; editor) Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (2002) At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (2006; editor, with Sonya O. Rose) Race, Nation and Empire: Making Histories, 1750 to the Present (2010; editor, with Keith McClelland) Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (2012) Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (2024)

Articles (Full text can also be requested via Researchgate.)