The violent unease of today’s world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. She lived through it all – tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration. She escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of its most influential and controversial public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, freedom. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience.
Lyndsey Stonebridge brings to Brussels the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century and beyond, and shows us how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. In dialogue with our troubled present, hers is a timely guide on how to live and think through the challenges of our unpredictable times - unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly as Arendt did.
About the speaker:
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge is a writer, critic, and Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Her work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, 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, while her more recent writing has focused on the creative history of responses to that violence in two awarding-winning books. The work of the twentieth-century political theorist, Hannah Arendt, has long been crucial Stonebridge’s understanding of modern history and contemporary politics. 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.
Event: Sunday December 1, 5:00pm-6:30pm