Catherine Hall
British feminist historian
Catherine Hall (born 1946) is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire.
Early life and education
Catherine Barrett (later Hall) was born in 1946 in Kettering, Northamptonshire, England. Her father, John Barrett, was a Baptist minister, while her mother, Gladys, came from a family of millers. Her parents met at Oxford University, where Gladys was studying history. When Catherine was three years old, the family moved to Leeds, Yorkshire, and she grew up there in a non-conformist household; both parents were "radical Labour". She went to grammar school, where she says she had an excellent education.
She then attended the University of Sussex at Falmer, but was living between Brighton and London, having met her future husband, Stuart Hall, who lived in London. She found herself out of place among the "stylish, metropolitan types" and bewildered by the emphasis on the multidisciplinary syllabus at Sussex.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Catherine Hall” as british feminist historian. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british feminist historian. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4952089. VIAF identifies the subject as 76343999. The Library of Congress control number is n85328847. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catherine Hall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.