Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge writes on twentieth-century literature and history, Human Rights and Refugee Studies, and teaches courses on the History of Human Rights and Literature and Human Rights. She is the lead for the Humanities in Human Rights network (http://www.humanities-human-rights.ac.uk/)

My research focuses on twentieth-century literature and history, Human Rights and Refugee Studies. I adopt a question-driven approach, which is why my work draws on the connections between literature, history, politics and, more recently, law. 

My latest book, The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh, 2011, paperback and e-book 2014), took the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point in order to think about the relation between law, justice and literature in the aftermath of total war and genocide. The book focused on the work of an extraordinary generation of women writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Thompson, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these women were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims.

Arendt’s important arguments about statelessness and human rights form the core of my new project, Placeless People: Rights, Writing and Refugees (forthcoming with OUP). This is a transnational study of how the literature of exile gave way to a more complicated and vexed articulation of statelessness. In 1944 Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' The book offers an intellectual and literary history of that transition.

My work on psychoanalysis and modern culture also focuses on the effects of war and displacement on the imagination. My books in this field include The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety (2007) and British Fiction after Modernism (with Marina MacKay, 2007).

I am the co-editor, with Allan Hepburn and Adam Piette, of the Mid-Century Series for Oxford University Press.

Acacemic lead for CHASE, 2010-13

Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research, 2008-2013

Twentieth-century literature and history, Human Rights and Refugee Studies.