Richard Hoggart and the International Journal of Cultural Studies – ten years on

The International Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) marks its tenth year of publication with this special issue on ‘The Uses of Richard Hoggart,’ co-edited by Sue Owen and John Hartley. The instigator was Sue Owen, who organised an International conference with that title at the University of Sheffield in April 2006. The conference also inaugurated the Hoggart Archive, after Sheffield University acquired 82 boxes of Richard Hoggart’s papers (see www.sheffield.ac.uk/hoggart.html). A full list of speakers at the conference is appended. Richard Hoggart himself made an appearance; his son Simon, a noted newspaper columnist in the UK, gave the speech at the conference dinner; and scholars and writers from three continents turned out to honour him, including Stuart Hall, his successor at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham.

For this journal the opportunity to publish some of the papers was too good to miss. Not only is
Richard Hoggart the founder of cultural studies in the UK, but he is also significant to the
founding of the IJCS. He featured prominently in the inaugural issue, with an interview, and an article on his work by Mark Gibson (Hartley & Gibson 1998; Gibson 1998; and see this issue). At that time, Richard Hoggart had just launched the Tom Hopkinson Centre for Media Research (named after the wartime editor of Picture Post) and the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural studies at Cardiff University, of which I was founding head. In other words, the
IJCS and its first institutional home were both launched by Richard Hoggart.

Publication details:
John Hartley (2007) ‘Richard Hoggart and the International Journal of Cultural Studies – ten years on,’ editorial in International Journal of Cultural Studies 10:1, pp. 5-9.