Hall's lecture, "You Are What You Eat: Slavery and the Politics of Diet in the Works of Thomas Tryon," is sponsored by the English department. It will relate how male authors--relying on concepts of white supremacy and inviolate female purity--helped construct an English identity in their writings of the transatlantic sugar trade and slavery in the New World.

A prolific author, Hall has published essays on race, gender, and early modern culture, including two on Shakespeare and pedagogy: "Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender (Shakespeare Quarterly, 1997) and "The Uses for a Dead White Male: Shakespeare, Feminism, and Diversity" (New Theatre Quarterly, 1995). Hall's book, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell, 1995), was named a Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book for 1996.

Hall currently is working on a book about food, women, and colonialism in 17th-century England, and is a contributor to the forthcoming Modern Language Association (MLA) publication Options for Teaching Early Modern British Women Writers.