2023 | Totalitarianism and the Humanities

Recorded April 19, 2023. The Trinity Long Room Hub Annual
Humanities Horizons Lecture for 2023 was delivered by Prof Lyndsey
Stonebridge (Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities and Human
Rights at the University of Birmingham). In February 2023, photos
appeared on social media of piles of books dumped in the streets
outside the Pryazovskyi State University in Mariupol, allegedly by
occupying Russian soldiers. In the US and elsewhere novels and
history books are being weaponized in the culture wars. The
humanities are back on the frontline of ideology and politics. In
this lecture, Lyndsey Stonebridge turns to political-philosopher,
Hannah Arendt’s writing on twentieth-century totalitarianism to
argue why we need to fight for a new anti-totalitarian humanities
today. Lyndsey Stonebridge is Interdisciplinary Professor of
Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham. Her
previous books include: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after
Nuremberg (2011), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay
Prize, 2014, Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees
(2018), winner of the Modernist Studies Association Best Book
Prize, 2018, and a collection of essay, Writing and Righting:
Literature in the Age of Human Rights (2020). We Are Free to Change
the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience will be
published by Jonathan Cape in January 2024. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/