Jamaican-British theorist who, more than any other single figure, invented cultural studies as a discipline and then refused to let it settle into one. Born in Kingston in 1932 to a middle-class mixed-race family and sent to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951, he arrived in a Britain that had no vocabulary for the subject he already was — colonial, Caribbean, Black, English-speaking, and not going home. The first editor of New Left Review (1960), director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham from 1968 to 1979, and later professor of sociology at the Open University, he built, around himself, the institutions through which a whole tradition of British thinking about race, class, media, and popular culture came into being.
His theoretical signature is the refusal of reduction. Against economistic Marxisms that treated culture as superstructure and politics as the mere expression of class interest, Hall argued — after Antonio Gramsci and a critical reading of Louis Althusser — that hegemony is won and re-won at the level of meaning, image, and common sense, and that any Left that cannot fight on that terrain has already lost. His 1973 paper "Encoding/Decoding" reframed media studies by insisting that audiences do not passively receive messages: texts are encoded with preferred meanings, and receivers decode them in dominant, negotiated, or oppositional ways. Policing the Crisis (1978, co-authored) read the early-1970s British panic over Black "mugging" as a manufactured condensation of anxieties about race, class, law, and a declining empire — anticipating by several years the analyses of authoritarian populism that he would sharpen in diagnosing Thatcherism, a term he helped define in the pages of Marxism Today and in The Hard Road to Renewal (1988).
Later work on diaspora and cultural identity — "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (1990), the essays collected in The Fateful Triangle — turned his method on himself: identity as a matter of becoming as well as being, always positioned, never finished, never a return to origins. He was instrumental in the wider recognition of Black British arts and filmmaking in the 1980s and 90s, a public intellectual of rare generosity, and the subject of John Akomfrah's elegiac documentary The Stuart Hall Project (2013). His posthumous memoir Familiar Stranger (2017) is indispensable for understanding where he was thinking from.