Laura Forster
Lecturer in Modern History (post-1750)

Profile

Biography

Dr Laura Forster is a historian of radical and socialist ideas, cultures, and communities in the long nineteenth century. Primarily she is a historian of modern Britain and France, but very much interested in the mobility of ideas and peoples across European borders and beyond. 

Laura completed her PhD at King’s College London. Before joining the University of York she held positions at the University of Manchester, Durham University, and Birkbeck College.

Research

Overview

Laura's research is concerned with the social life of ideas: the social, emotional, and spatial contexts within which radical ideas are produced and propagated. Broadly speaking she is interested in how activists, political groups, and ordinary people experience and generate political ideas. As such, her work is also concerned with the afterlives of revolutionary and radical activity, in how memories and mythologies of past activism are redeployed in new historical presents.

Her first book, The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2025) is about the political refugees who came to Britain following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. Considering the intellectual impact of these revolutionary refugees and the longer cultural and political afterlives of the Paris Commune in Britain, the book reconstructs a transnational intellectual history alive to the intimate, embodied, spatial, active, and emotional contexts in which these political ideas were produced and exchanged.  The book argues that the Paris Commune mattered in Britain. Its diffuse legacies operated across differing scales - from intimate friendships that prompted individual political conversions, to the production of international symbols able to galvanise a nationwide socialist movement. And these legacies waned and waxed in the decades long after the Communard refugees left Britain.

Laura also has practical and research interests in public history and in queer histories and methodologies. She is currently working on a new project about intimacy, activism, and spaces of prefigurative politics in nineteenth century Britain. As part of this project, Laura will be working with community groups, Clarion clubs, local activists, and miners’ welfares in Yorkshire and the North east. 

Laura is a former editor at History Workshop Online, and enjoys working collaboratively and across disciplines. She has a book forthcoming with Pluto Press, co-written with Joel White. Friends in Common: radical friendship & everyday solidarities (2025) is an interdisciplinary exploration of friendship as a radical practice. The book argues that friendship is full of revolutionary potential in the face of a profoundly anti-social capitalist system. Friendship can transcend and subvert borders and binaries. It is vital in building communities and underpinning solidarity. As a result, friendship is often policed as a threat. Friends in Common considers our contemporary moment, but also looks to other times and contexts when friendship has been ascendent in political struggle. Understanding the radical possibilities of friendship can help us rethink our approach to family, work, and politics, and provide new routes to resistance and ways to open up spaces of solidarity and escape.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Arguments and Analysis
• Historical Thinking
• Emotions

Postgraduate

• Making socialists: oppositional cultures & radical ideas in Britain c. 1871-1900
• Research Training

Publications

Full publications list

Books

 The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2025)

Friends in Common: radical friendship & everyday solidarities (co-written with Joel White, forthcoming with Pluto Press, 2025)

 Journal Articles

 ‘Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference’, British Journal for the History of Science, 56, 469–484 (2023)

 ‘Radical commemoration, the politics of the street, and the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871’, History Workshop Journal, 92, 83–105 (2021)

 ‘The Paris Commune in the British socialist imagination, 1871–1914’, History of European Ideas, 46 (5), 614–632 (2020)

 ‘The Paris Commune in London and the spatial history of ideas, 1871–1900’, The Historical Journal, 62 (4), 1021–1044 (2019)

 Book Chapters

 ‘The Blue Posts’, in Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub (Open City, 2021)

 Magazine Articles

 ‘When the Commune came to Britain’, Tribune (Spring 2021), 86­–93

 ‘Building “our” Commune: exiled Communards in Britain’, ROAR Magazine, 23 April 2021

 ‘The Paris Commune in Britain’, DOPE Magazine, 23 November 2021

 ‘Radical Friendship’, History Workshop Online, 10 June 2020

 ‘Radical Object: Walter Crane’s The Workers’ Maypole (1894)’, History Workshop Online, 1 May 2020

 Podcasts

 ‘After Storming Heaven’, Novara Media, March 2021

 ‘Queer Joy: Taking Up Space’, History Workshop Online, February 2021

 ‘Queer Lives: Public History and the Queer Archive’, History Workshop Online, February 2021

 ‘An Age of Walls?’, History Workshop Online, September 2020