Richard Hoggart was director and co-founder with Stuart Hall of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. After the Second World War, which interrupted his graduate research, he joined a generation of British thinkers who were part of the postwar explosion in education. He pioneered the field of cultural studies. His influential book The Uses of Literacy (1956) studied the influence of mass culture on the lives of the British urban working class in the years after the Second World War. He wrote 15 additional books, and edited several more. Outside of the university, Hoggart was a witness in the 1960 Lady Chatterly trials, which liberalized British pornography laws, and he was also instrumental in the establishment of the television channel BBC2. He was active in pressing for improved public libraries, adult education, and the arts. In founding cultural studies, Hoggart treated the speech and writing of people from all walks of life as literary texts that could bear the weight of academic criticism. After publishing The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart took a position as senior lecturer in English at the University of Leicester, before in 1962 moving to the University of Birmingham to become a professor. In 1969, he took a job as the director-general of UNESCO, but in 1975 resigned in disgust at what he perceived to be its misconduct. He later published a book, An Idea and Its Servants, about his experience. Afterward, he became warden of Goldsmith College in London. He died in 2014.
Hoggart’s Dunning Trust lecture was held on September 23, 1968.