The Making of The Popular Arts: Stuart Hall at the Turn of the 1960s with david scott

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, David Scott (Columbia University / Clark Fellow) examines the career of Stuart Hall and the publication of Hall’s landmark book, The Popular Arts. Influenced by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), this much-neglected book helped to inaugurate the study of contemporary popular culture as well as contemporary media studies. Engaging television and cinema, audience and institutions, critics and young people, the book was wide-ranging in its attempt to offer an analytical frame for rethinking the old distinction between "high" and "low" culture. The talk will contextualize The Popular Arts and discuss its importance both in the evolution of Stuart Hall’s thinking in the 1960s, and in the making of Cultural Studies.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Cover detail of the first edition of The Popular Arts by Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel