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/