Lyndsey Stonebridge, author portrait
© Catherine Shakespeare Lane

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Lyndsey Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her most recent book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience, which was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Award for Biography. She is featured in the PBS/American Masters documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny as one of the leading authorities of Arendt and her writings. Stonebridge's previous books include Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collection Writing and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster. She is currently working on a new book, Old Women: A History of Our Future (2027). She lives in London and France.
We Are Free to Change the World

Books

We Are Free to Change the World

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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