When: Wednesday, June 8, 2022, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM
Where: ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

The Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context is delighted to welcome Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, to give the annual CLSGC lecture this year. Professor Stonebridge’s interdisciplinary work brings literary and psychoanalytical perspectives to the study of human rights and refugees, including Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018) and Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She has written extensively on Hannah Arendt and her new book, What we are doing: Thinking with Hannah Arendt, will be published by Jonathan Cape in 2023.

The lecture, “Hannah Arendt in Kafr-Qasim”, will consider the following topic:

Hannah Arendt’s controversial reports from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem are well known. But before then another atrocity trial caught her attention: the trial of soldiers accused of a massacre of Palestinians at Kafr-Qasim on the eve of the Suez crisis. This talk returns to that earlier trial to ask questions about the separation between legal and moral responsibility, and the responsibility of memory, today.

About the speaker

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 Statesman, Prospect 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.