Lyndsey Stonebridge - Biography#

Lyndsey Stonebridge took her Masters at Sussex University and her PhD at The University of London (both funded by British Academy studentship). Professor Stonebridge joined the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, as Interdisciplinary Chair in Humanities and Human Rights in September 2018. This innovative Research Chair was created for her, and designed to further new understandings of how the arts and humanities connect with wider global histories of justice and human rights. She leads the Humanities and Human Rights Initiative, which will become an established centre in 2021. Before her move to the University of 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.

Professor Stonebridge’s work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law and social policy. Her work has long been concerned with 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 research has focused on the creative history of responses to that violence (The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011), Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees (2018). 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 her current collaborative Global Challenges project with refugees and their host communities in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, Refugee Hosts.

She broadcasts, writes, and blogs regularly in the UK and European media on the cultural politics of human rights and, most recently, refugees and migration. In 1997-1998 she was Fellow of the Society of Humanities at Cornell University, and, in 2010, was Visiting Professor at the University of Sydney. In 2018 she gave the Annual John Coffin Lecture at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London. In 2019 she will deliver the 1939 Society Lecture in Holocaust Studies Lecture at UCLA.