Kim F. Hall

Kim Hall the Lucyle Hook Professor of English and a Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College. Hall's research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities.

Her first book, Things of Darkness (1996) used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature and helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance / Early Modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (2006) offers readers visual and verbal textual materials that illuminate themes in Shakespeare’s play Othello: The Moor of Venice. Sweet Taste of Empire (2025), her third book, examines the roles of race, aesthetics and gender in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the 17th century.

Hall held the Thomas F.X. Mullarkey Chair in English, the first chair in the humanities while at Fordham University and came to Barnard College in 2006 to direct the Africana Studies program. She is a past chair of the Shakespeare Division of the Modern Language Association and a former Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America. Her past fellowships include a National Humanities Center Fellowship; a Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; an NEH fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago; and an ACLS fellowship. 

Hall holds a doctorate in 16th and 17th century English literature from the University of Pennsylvania.