Lyndsey Stonebridge
Humanities Scholarship
Fall 2023
(Public Humanities) – Scholar, Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham – Ireland/United Kingdom
Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books include Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees;The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg, and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be published in January 2024. A regular media commentator and broadcaster, she lives in London and France.
In How Shall I Be Old? Lyndsey Stonebridge experiments with philosophy and life-writing to inquire into the late lives of modern women. During her residency, she will be working on an opening chapter, featuring a debate that very nearly took place between Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Later in life, both women turned to Cicero’s Cato Maior de Senectute (Cato the Elder on Age) but drew strikingly different conclusions from the stoic’s affirmation of the wisdom of old age. The ambition is to find a literary form that can open up their quarrel, and its significance, to the present.