Biography

Stephen G. Hall, Ph.D. is an editor and trained historian. Deeply interested in the tangible and practical meanings of the Humanities in public life, Hall is currently the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Historianspeaks, a dynamic web platform established in 2020 devoted to making Black History accessible to the public. The platform consists of a weekly blog and podcast as well as visual elements (photos and videos). To date, it has published more than 1,800 blogs on all facets of the Black experience.

Previously, Hall served as Section Editor for The North Star, an online newspaper, working with contributors on issues of race, gender, and class as well as social justice, equity, discrimination, and civil rights. He wrote over sixty articles (Breaking News and Op-Eds) on a wide variety of topics in these areas. Hall also serves as a Special Editor and staff writer for Bavual, The African Heritage Magazine, and has contributed to The Cleveland Call and Post. He has made regular appearances on WEAA Radio (Morgan State University) and as a guest speaker in numerous communication forums.

As a trained historian, Hall has extensive experience as a professor, researcher, editor, manuscript and article reviewer, author, presenter, administrator, and historical consultant. In 2024, Hall was a Finalist in the ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship. In 2017–2018, he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle, North Carolina, where he worked on his second book manuscript exploring the scholarly production of Black historians on the African Diaspora from 1885–1960, tentatively titled “Global Visions: African Historians Engage the World, 1885–1960.” Hall formerly served as the History Program Coordinator at Alcorn State University (HBCU) in Lorman, Mississippi. For the past twenty years, he has taught a wide variety of courses in his areas of expertise.

Hall is the author of A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth Century America, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2009, which appeared in the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. His scholarly work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His work has also appeared in numerous online publications including Black Perspectives and Public Books.

In addition to traditional academic work, Hall maintains an active presence on X, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr, engaging the public on a wide variety of historical, social, political, and cultural topics germane to the Public Humanities.

He has received numerous awards and grants for his scholarly work, including a National Humanities Fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a W.E.B. Du Bois Fellowship at Harvard University, and the Carter G. Woodson Fellowship from Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library (MARBL). In Spring 2015, Hall served as a Humanities Writ Large Fellow and Visiting Professor in the History Department at Duke University.

He is currently working on an edited book titled “History as a Communal Act,” and several smaller projects focusing on African American Studies. Hall is a proud graduate of the Honors Program at Morgan State University (HBCU), where he received a B.A. in History. He received an M.A. in African American Studies with a concentration in History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Ph.D. in History at The Ohio State University.