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Stuart McPhail Hall was a Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He is one of the founding figures of cultural studies. He was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. His family was middle class and mixed race. His parents wanted him to identify as British rather than Jamaican or Black. This early pressure shaped his lifelong interest in identity. In 1951, at nineteen, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He travelled to England and never moved back to live in Jamaica. He later described arriving in Britain as becoming a 'familiar stranger'. He knew the language and the books. But the country did not know him. This in-between position gave him his unique way of seeing things. He studied literature at Oxford but grew bored with traditional academic work. In the 1950s he helped found the New Left Review. This was a journal for socialist thinkers who rejected both Soviet communism and old British Labour politics. In 1964 he joined the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He became its director in 1968. For the next ten years, he turned it into the most important cultural studies centre in the world. In 1979 he moved to the Open University, which taught mostly through TV and correspondence. He wanted to reach ordinary people, not just university students. He stayed there until he retired. He died on 10 February 2014, aged 82. He had suffered from kidney failure for many years.