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.

David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the department of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of a number of books, including Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017) and Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (2024). The founding editor of Small Axe, Scott is director of the Small Axe Project. In 2022, he was the lead curator of Pressure, the Kingston Biennial. Currently at work on a biography of Stuart Hall, Scott will devote his time at the Clark to examining Hall’s work in the 1970s. 

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. 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