Introduction
Catherine Hall FBA (born 1946 in Kettering) is a British feminist historian. Her work is focused on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race and empire. She has been elected fellow of British Academy in 2018, and has received an honorary degree from University of York in 2019. She has rejected the Dan David Prize in 2014, out of support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-movement
Biography
Hall was born Catherine Barrett in 1946 in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Her father, John Barrett, was a baptist minister, while her mother, Gladys came from a family of millers. In the early 1960s, while on a march for Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Hall would meet her future husband, Professor Stuart Hall, and the two would go on to marry in 1964. The couple had two daughters, Becky and Jess, and the family lived in Birmingham. In 1970 Hall attended the UK's first national women's liberation conference at Ruskin College, Oxford. She also became a member of the Feminist Review Collective between 1981–1997. Her husband, Stuart, with whom she travelled, died in 2014.
Supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions-movement in 2014 she rejected the award of the Dan David Prize from the Dan David Foundation in Tel Aviv, Israel. Hall stated that it was "an independent political choice" to reject the award which included a £225,000 research fund. In July 2018 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and in 2019 received an honorary degree from the University of York.