Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

Department of English Literature
Interdisciplinary Chair of Humanities and Human Rights

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law, and social policy.

Stonebridge’s early work was concerned with the effects of modern violence on the mind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). Her more recent writing has focussed on the creative history of responses to that violence in two awarding-winning books:  The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg 2011), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2014, and Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize 2018.  In 2020 she published a collection of essays, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020), which drew on her journalism and work her work with two major interdisciplinary research projects  Refugee Hosts and Rights4Time.

The work of the twentieth-century political theorist, Hannah Arendt, has long been crucial Stonebridge’s understanding of modern history and contemporary politics. Her new book We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be published by Jonathan Cape (UK), Hogarth Press (US) and C.H. Beck (Germany) in 2024.

She has held fellowships and visiting positions at Cornell University, the University of Sydney and the Holocaust Research at Royal Holloway University, London.

She is a fellow of the English Association and the Academia Europaea. In 2021 she was awarded a Leverhulme Major Fellowship. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in July 2023.

A regular broadcaster and media commentator, she contributes to The New Statesman.

Qualifications

  • PhD, University of London.
  • MA Critical Theory, University of Sussex.
  • BA (Hons) English, 1st Class, Polytechnic of North London.

Biography

Lyndsey Stonebridge joined the Department of English Literature and the Institute into Research into Superdiversity at the University of Birmingham, as Interdisciplinary Chair in Humanities and Human Rights in September 2018. She also teaches in the Law School. This innovative interdisciplinary appointment is designed to further new understandings of how the arts and humanities connect with wider global histories of justice and human rights. Before coming to Birmingham, Professor Stonebridge had a long career at the University of East Anglia, where, among other roles, she was the founding Associate Dean of the Arts and Humanities Graduate School. Interdisciplinarity and the real-world relevance of humanities scholarship are core to her thinking, writing, and teaching.  She broadcasts, writes, and blogs regularly in the media on the cultural politics of human rights and, most recently, refugees and migration. 

Postgraduate supervision

• Interdisciplinary Human Rights and Refugee Studies
• Modern, Contemporary, and Postcolonial literatures
• Hannah Arendt and Critical Theory


Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

 

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law, and social policy. Her early work was concerned with the effects of modern violence on the mind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (1998) and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). Over the past ten years her research has focussed on the creative history of responses to that violence in two awarding-winning books, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, 2014, and Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize 2018, and in her recent collection of essays, Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020). 

The work of the twentieth-century political theorist, Hannah Arendt, is central to Professor Stonebridge’s understanding of modern history, violence, statelessness, and judgement. She is currently writing a critical-creative account of the relevance Arendt’s thinking for today, Thinking Like Hannah Arendt, which will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2022.  

The interdisciplinary focus of Professor Stonebridge’s work is key to her wider project to re-cast global histories of human rights and justice across a broad and comparative modern moral and political canvas, such, for example, as in the collaborative Global Challenges project with refugees and their host communities in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, Refugee Hosts, and with the University of Birmingham’s Rights4Time Global network.

She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster, and has written for The New StatesmanProspect Magazine. She is co-editor of Oxford University Press’s Mid-Century Series, and has held visiting positions at Cornell University and the University of Sydney. In 2017, she was elected as a Fellow of the English Association, and in 2019 was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.

Other activities

  • Co-editor, with Allan Hepburn and Adam Piette, Mid-Century Series, Oxford University Press.
  • Member AHRC ODA Peer Review College, MLA Memory Studies Executive.
  • Editorial Boards: Migration and SocietyHumanity: An International Journal of Human RightsHumanitarianism, and DevelopmentHistory: The Journal of the Historical AssociationPsychoanalysis and HistoryFutures of the Archive: Theory, Life and TechnologyEnglish Association Monographs: English at the Interface.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Stonebridge, L 2020, Writing and righting: Literature in the age of human rights. Oxford University Press, Oxford. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/writing-and-righting-9780198814054>

Stonebridge, L (ed.) 2019, Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Stonebridge, L 2018, Placeless people: writings, rights, and refugees. Oxford University Press. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/placeless-people-9780198797005?cc=gb&lang=en&#>

Article

Stonebridge, L 2024, 'Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt', Journal of Genocide Research, pp. 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2351263

Stonebridge, L 2021, 'The flight's lost moment', Arendt Studies. https://doi.org/10.5840/arendtstudies20214934

Stonebridge, L 2017, 'Humanitarian was never enough: Dorothy Thompson, Sands of Sorrow and the Arabs of Palestine', Humanity, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 441-465. https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2017.0027

Stonebridge, L 2015, 'Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline: André Green, W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh', Textual Practice, vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 1331-1354. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1095454

Stonebridge, L 2014, 'The Last of the Just: An Untimely Novel for our Times', European Judaism, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 26-40. https://doi.org/10.3167/ej.2014.47.01.05

Potter, R & Stonebridge, L 2014, 'Writing and Rights', Critical Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12157

Stonebridge, L 2012, 'Bomby i róże - pismo lęku w Caught Henry 'ego Greena, trans. Mikołaj Wiśniewski', Literatura na Świecie, vol. 03-04/2012 (488-489), pp. 140-168.

Chapter

Stonebridge, L 2018, The banality of Brexit. in R Eaglestone (ed.), Brexit and Literature. 1 edn, Routledge-Cavendish, pp. 7-14. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351203197

Stonebridge, L 2016, ‘Inner Emigration’: On the Run with Hannah Rendt and Anna Freud. in M Ffytche & D Pick (eds), Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism. 1st edn, The New Library of Psychoanalysis 'Beyond the Couch' Series, Routledge-Cavendish, pp. Chapter 4. <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315760773/chapters/10.4324/9781315760773-4>

Stonebridge, L 2014, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill-Tidings, Statelessness, Rights and Speech’. in The Future of Testimony. Routledge-Cavendish, pp. 113-128.

Stonebridge, L 2013, 'That which you are denying us': Refugees, Rights and Writing in Arendt. in G Buelens, S Durrant & R Eaglestone (eds), The Future of Trauma Theory. Routledge-Cavendish.

Comment/debate

Stonebridge, L 2016, '30@30: the future of literary thinking: Education Beyond Metaphor', Textual Practice, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 1161-1162. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1252578

View all publications in research portal

Expertise

  • Expertise: Modern Literature and Intellectual History, Hannah Arendt, human rights, refugees.
  • Media Experience: Regular and experienced journalist and broadcaster.
  • Languages and other information:
  • Agent: Zoë Waldie, RCW, olivia@rcwlitagency.com

Expertise

  • Arts and humanities approaches to human rights issues.