Author Archives: Lyndsey Stonebridge

About Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her recent books include Placeless People: Rights, Writing, and Refugees (OUP, 2018), The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Her other books include The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (2007), and British Fiction after Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century (with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently completing a short book on human rights and literature, Writing and Righting (OUP, 2020), and collaborating on a large project with refugee and host communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, Refugee Hosts. A regular media commentator, she has written for The New Statesman, Prospect and The New Humanist.

Diagonals of Freedom

This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is always a special act of scholarly good faith to take time to read, respond, and write about one another’s work; I thank my colleagues for their generous care, attention, and criticism, and the editors of Humanity for creating this space for dialogue and future thinking. Two themes emerge from these responses to Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, one methodological, the other Continue reading →

Humanitarianism Was Never Enough: Dorothy Thompson, Sands of Sorrow, and the Arabs of Palestine

If governments get the idea that they can expropriate their citizens and turn them loose on the kindness of the rest of the world, the business will never end. A precedent will be created; a formula will have been found. —Dorothy Thompson, “Escape in a Frozen World,” Survey Graphic, 1939 “Politics,” said Aristotle, “is the art of discerning what is good for mankind.” The problem of the Arab refugee can make or break support for the west in the most critical strategical area, economically and Continue reading → Continue reading →