Herbert Richard Hoggart (24 September 1918 – 10 April 2014) was an English academic whose career covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture. Early life Hoggart was born in the Potternewton area of Leeds, one of three children in an impoverished family. His father, Tom Longfellow Hoggart (1880–1922), the son of a boilermaker, was a regular infantry soldier and housepainter who died of brucellosis when Hoggart was a year old, and his mother Adeline died of a chest illness when he was eight. He grew up with his grandmother in Hunslet, and was encouraged in his education by an aunt. Emulating his elder brother, Tom, the first of the family to go to a grammar school, he gained a place at Cockburn High School which was a grammar school, after his headmaster requested that the education authority reread his scholarship examination essay. He then won a scholarship to study English at the University of Leeds, where he graduated with a first class degree. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II and was discharged as a staff captain. Career He was a staff tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959, and published his first book, a study of W. H. Auden's poetry, in 1951. His major work, The Uses of Literacy, was published in 1957. Partly autobiography, the volume was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic working class popular culture in Britain, and denouncing the imposition of a mass culture through advertising, media and Americanisation. He became Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962. Hoggart was an expert witness at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, and his argument that it was an essentially moral and "puritan" work, which merely repeated words he had heard on a building site on his way to the court, is sometimes viewed as having had a decisive influence on the outcome of the trial. While Professor of English at Birmingham University between 1962 and 1973, he founded the institution's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 and was its director until 1969. Hoggart was Assistant Director-General of UNESCO (1971–1975) and finally Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London (1976–1984), after which he retired from formal academic life. The Main Building at Goldsmiths has now been renamed the "Richard Hoggart Building" in tribute to