Befriending the dead: history, friendship & talking across time

Join us for the second IPUP talk of 2025/26, with York's own Dr Laura Forster, author of Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities (Pluto Press, 2025).

• Members of the public and all staff and students are welcome to IPUP seminars.
• The talk will last 40 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.
• We will have Christmas drinks and refreshments throughout and afterwards until 7pm.

The Talk: Befriending the dead: history, friendship & talking across time

People in Britain are lonely; Britain is also one of the most age-segregated countries in the world. These realities create generational antagonisms that play out with often dangerous consequences, particularly for the most marginalized. This talk considers how history, in its practice and in its subjects, can reveal the relational and reparative function of cross-generational solidarities. It explores histories of radical friendship in the nineteenth century and today to argue that history itself is a form of intergenerational friendship. History, like friendship, can be a politically powerful way of talking and learning across time, connecting past, present, and future struggle.

Speaker Biography

Laura Forster is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. She is a member of the History Workshop collective and the author of The Paris Commune in Britain: radicals, refugees, and revolutionaries after 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2025) and Friends in Common: radical friendship and everyday solidarities (Pluto Press, 2025).

Accessibility

The Treehouse is on the second floor of the Berwick Saul building and can be accessed via stairs and lift.

Also check out other Workshops in York, Arts events in York, Literary Art events in York.