The violent unease of today’s world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. ‎Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass ‎migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all.
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Born in the first decade of the last century, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life ‎for herself in America, where she became one of the world’s most influential - and ‎controversial - public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and, ‎above all, about freedom. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. In ‎place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity ‎and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it.
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This event brings together two of the world’s leading Arendt scholars, Lyndsey Stonebridge ‎and Samantha Rose Hill, to discuss Arendt’s life and work and its urgent dialogue with our ‎troubled present. Stonebridge and Hill will call on us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did ‎‎- unflinchingly, lovingly and defiantly - through our own unpredictable times.
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Lyndsey Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of ‎Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her previous books include ‎Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018, Oxford UP), winner of the Modernist ‎Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and The Judicial ‎Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (2011, Edinburgh UP). Her new book, We Are Free ‎to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience, is published by ‎Jonathan Cape.
Website: lyndseystonebridge.com
Twitter: / lyndseystonebri
Book: www.penguin.co.uk/books/44170... ‎
Samantha Rose Hill is the author of two books: Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) ‎and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (co-edited with Genese Grill, ‎‎2023, Liveright). She regularly contributes to publications including Los Angeles Review of ‎Books, Contemporary Political Theory and The South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently ‎writing a book on loneliness.
Website: www.samantharosehill.com ‎
Newsletter: samantharosehill.substack.com
Twitter: / samantharhill ‎