David Scott

“During the fellowship year, I will be working on a biography of Stuart Hall (1932-2014), the Jamaican-British cultural theorist. Specifically, I will be focusing on the “conjuncture” of 1956, the crisis (precipitated by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, on the one hand, and the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone, on the other) that led to the formation of the British New Left. Hall, still a student at Oxford writing a dissertation on Henry James, was a central figure in the emergence of the New Left. He was a founding editor of two of the defining journals of the moment — the student-led Universities and Left Review and subsequently the New Left Review, the latter created out of the merger between Universities and Left Review and the ex-Communist-led New Reasoner. My talk will try to craft a story of Hall’s journey from 1956 up until the end of 1961 when he resigned his editorship of the New Left Review.” David Scott