Annual Sanctuary Lecture – 2nd April 2025
This year, the University of St Andrews is celebrating five years as a University of Sanctuary. This stands as testament to our commitment to making higher education accessible for those seeking sanctuary and to helping to foster a culture of welcome throughout the UK. Our Annual Sanctuary Lecture is an opportunity to hear from experts about themes and issues connected to sanctuary. After opening remarks from the Deputy Principal and Vice-Principal (International Strategy and External Relations), Professor Brad MacKay, this year’s Sanctuary Lecture will be given by author and award-winning journalist Jen Stout, and will unfold as a conversation with David Herd, Professor in the School of English at St Andrews, and Berry Chair of Literature and Human Rights.
The lecture will open with Jen’s account of the journeys that make up Night Train to Odesa, which takes the reader from Siberia to the Danube border crossings to Ukraine’s frontlines, documenting the impact of Russian aggression. As it unfolds, the discussion will reflect on the causes of contemporary displacement, the need for renewed commitments to human rights, and the importance of story in creating spaces of welcome.
The Sanctuary Lecture will be held on Wednesday 2 April 2025 in Parliament Hall from 5.30pm to 6.30pm.
There will be a reception following the event from 6.30pm.
If you would like to attend, please register for the event.
Jen Stout is an award-winning journalist, author and radio producer from Scotland. She has covered the war in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion in 2022, for outlets such as BBC radio, London Review of Books, Prospect, and the Sunday Post. Previously she had jobs in TV and radio with the BBC and was a local newspaper reporter. Her work in Ukraine was shortlisted for prizes by Amnesty International, the Foreign Press Association and the Scottish Press Awards. In 2023 she won a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors, and a Rory Peck Trust bursary in 2022. Jen’s debut book Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War was published in 2024 with Polygon and won First Book at the Saltire Society awards. It was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week.
David Herd is a poet, critic and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales. His work is at the intersection of literature and human rights. His critical history, Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human was published by Oxford University Press in September 2023 and was shortlisted for the MSA (Modernist Studies Association) Book Prize 2024. It will be out in paperback in June 2025. His most recent collection of poetry, Walk Song (2022), was a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has published widely on the politics of human movement and on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics and has held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University and the Writing Center Gloucester, MA. His edited volume, Contemporary Olson, was published by Manchester University Press in 2016.
In collaboration with Anna Pincus and colleagues at Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, he has co-organised Refugee Tales since 2014, helping to articulate the call for a future without detention. He teaches in the School of English at St Andrews where he is Berry Chair of Literature and Human Rights. Refugee Tales makes its call by sharing the stories of people who have experienced indefinite detention in the UK. Stories have been published in four volumes by Comma Press.
David is currently Co-Investigator on the AHRC project ‘Archive of Solidarity: Precarity, Creativity and Shared Future-Making across Closed Borders’ (PI, Dr Ozlem Biner, SOAS). He was Principal Investigator on the British Academy project ‘Hostile Environments: Polices, Stories, Responses’ from 2019-2022.
Visit our Sanctuary page to learn more about our work around Sanctuary initiatives.