Profile: Interview with Professor Catherine Hall

As the winner of this year's Leverhulme Medal, Professor Catherine Hall (UCL history) discusses what it means to be a feminist historian and how contemporary politics, and a surprising find in Jamaica, changed her research. Catherine Hall is emerita professor of modern British social and cultural history, and chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL. Earlier this month the British Academy awarded her its Leverhulme Medal and Prize "for the impact her scholarship has made across modern and contemporary British history, particularly in the fields of class, gender, empire and postcolonial history". Where and when were you born? Kettering, Northamptonshire, 1946. My father was a Baptist minister in Kettering at that time. He met my mother at the University of Oxford, where she was first generation studying history. We moved to Leeds when I was three. How has that shaped you? Leeds was a good place to grow up. It was a big northern city with a long history of radical liberalism. I remember going to concerts at the city library and the town hall, and the very powerful civic culture there was. I also grew up in a nonconformist world; my parents were both radical Labour and I had an excellent conventional grammar school education, where I had a wonderful history teacher. That was very important; it instilled in me from an early age how important teaching was and what a difference it can make. What kind of undergraduate were you at university?