Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge FBA FEA (born February 1965) is an English scholar and professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham. Her work relates to refugee studies, human rights, and the effects of violence on the mind in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also a regular radio and media commentator, writing for publications such as The New Statesman, Prospect Magazine, and New Humanist.

Career Lyndsey Stonebridge was born in Bromley, Kent. She earned her BA at the Polytechnic of North London, an MA in critical theory from the University of Sussex, and her PhD at the University of London.

She was a professor of modern literature and history at the University of East Anglia, where she founded the Arts and Humanities Graduate School. Currently, she is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, where she also teaches in the Law School.

Her book, We Are Free to Change the World, was shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

Views on human rights and refugees

Stonebridge believes that novels and poetry "embody and express" our conceptions of human rights and humanity as time moves on. Literary writing, she says, can be a political act that "gives form and meaning" She elaborates on Arendt's argument that human rights can never truly be "human" as long as they are tied to nation states, citizenship, and sovereignty. This is most obvious in the world's treatment of refugees. As people who "opened up a space…for thinking and being between nation states", refugees are the ones for whom the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should most clearly apply. However, their effective (albeit, often unofficial) statelessness leaves them in a state of limbo, without what Arendt describes as a "right to have rights". Oxford University Press, 2021

We Are Free To Change The World Jonathan Cape (2024) (Biography of Hannah Arendt)

Edited Reading Melanie Klein. Routledge, London and New York, 1998. (edited with John Phillips) British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century. Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2007. (edited with Marina Mackay)