Stuart Hall Archive Project Reading Seminar: Summer Specials

The Stuart Hall Archive Project Readings Seminar in 2026 continues with a Summer Special!

Wednesday 3 June, 3–5pm (BRIG Café): ‘Stuart Hall's Calypso Kings essay and Music in His Thought’. 

In the summer of 2002, Stuart Hall published an essay on the history of Caribbean music in Britain (available here: ‘Calypso Kings’). Join Les Back and Mykaell Riley, in a conversation about that essay, and the importance of music to Hall’s thought and our own.

Mykaell Riley’s career started as a founder member of the British roots Reggae band Steel Pulse who went onto receive a Grammy. Over the years he has performed, managed, produced and arranged for many successful artists. He also formed Britain's first black pop string section, the Reggae Philharmonic Orchestra, and composed extensively for the BBC, ITV, SKY, Endemol and Netflix. Mykaell is Director of the Black Music Research Unit (BMRU), which he established at the University of Westminster in 2012. On the back of several smaller grants, in 2016, he landed his first major award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Titled Bass Culture, the project focused on the history and impact of reggae music in the UK. The first output in 2017 was the Grime Report, which, in partnership with Ticketmaster and Live Nation, led to a change in the London Metropolitan Police’s approach to policing live events. In 2018 he staged the Bass Culture Exhibition, the UK's largest exhibit on the impact of Jamaican music, and in 2019 he released the Bass Culture documentary film: an intergenerational journey through Soundsystem culture, from Ska to UK Grime music.

Les Back is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He is also a journalist, broadcaster and musician. His published work is mainly in the areas of the sociology of race and racism, urban culture and music. He started writing about reggae in 1988 with his essay ‘Coughing Up Fire’ published in New Formations. His book Migrant City (Routledge, 2018) (co-authored with Shamser Sinha, Charlynne Bryan, Vlad Baraka & Mardoche Yembi) develops an experimental mode of co-creation in which research participants are also credited as authors. Most recently, he has published The Unfinished Politics of Race (University of Cambridge Press, 2022) with colleagues Michael Keith, John Solomos & Kalbir Shukra.

About the Stuart Hall Archive Project Readings Seminar

The seminar provides an opportunity to read and listen to a selection of Stuart Hall’s unpublished lectures, interviews, and letters, discussing his life and work and our own times.

Each month, the Stuart Hall Archive Project (SHAP), will provide digital access to material from the papers of Stuart Hall, held at the Cadbury Research Library.

Open to all - researchers, students, teachers, activists, poets, artists, organisers, those who do the work and need some time to think - the seminars will be held in person at the Birmingham Race Impact Group (BRIG) Café, 54-57 Allison Street, 3-5pm on Wednesday mid-month, with invited discussants who will lead the conversation.