Laurel Forster

Laurel Forster is Associate Professor of Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests are in women's cultures, history and literature, and she has published extensively in this area, discussing political and feminist imperatives across print and broadcast genres. Her publications include: Magazine Movements (Bloomsbury, 2015); Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Postwar and Contemporary Period (EUP 2020); Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement in the Western World 1960-1999 (Routledge, 2018); and British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Laurel’s writing explores the changes in women’s lives over the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, in social, domestic and media contexts. Her particular interest is the confluence between women’s agency and texts, as in her recent article: ‘Cookbooks and Counterculture’ in Food and Foodways (2023:31(3)). Her current projects are: 'Writing Herstories', about life writing and feminism; and 'The Determined Sewist', which examines the relationship between politics, craft and the media. Laurel Forster and Sue Bruley co-lead the Heritage Lottery-funded project ‘Hidden Histories: Women’s Activism in Portsmouth since 1960’ which recovered nearly sixty stories of feminism and grass roots activism in Portsmouth.