[3] She was a professor of modern literature and history at the University of East Anglia, where she founded the Arts and Humanities Graduate School.
Accordingly, much of her work is rooted in the field of literary criticism, whereby she surveys different sources of literature, such as those by Franz Kafka, George Orwell, and Simone Weil, to explore modern statelessness and the connection between citizenship and human rights.
As people who "opened up a space…for thinking and being between nation states",[8] refugees are the ones for whom the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) should most clearly apply.
For example, Stonebridge cites the enforcement (or lack thereof) of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 as a failure of the UN's commitment to self determination and universal Human Rights after the creation of Israel,[8] which Arendt criticized as unable to solve the problem of refugees, as like any nation-state, it is bound to simply create new refugees to replace the old.
The protagonist, K, can be viewed as a refugee, migrant, or "Jew stranger"[8] lured by false promises (such as universal human rights) that are actually irreconcilable with the functioning of the castle's ( or nation's) bureaucracy.
However, she is critical of "blindly humanistic" romanticized narratives of internationalism or exile, framed as an intellectual choice and path to freedom.