Living with the dead: The stories families tell with Dr Laura King

Families ‘keep alive’ their dead through visits to graves, the keeping of objects, the displaying of photos – but perhaps the most slippery and the most meaningful is storytelling.

In this talk, Dr Laura King will discuss the wide range of emotions stories can bring about, and how families navigate both the positive tales of success and the secrets and difficult moments in a family’s past. She’ll tell you some stories about her grandmother, Anne, or Nanny King, or even ‘Nanette’, and through this example, we’ll think about how stories are not just interesting because of what they tell us about a family’s past, but how the telling of the tale matters as much as the tale itself.

Dr Laura King is a historian and Associate Professor at the University of Leeds, who works on the histories of families and everyday life in modern Britain. Her book, Living with the Dead: Histories, Memories and the Stories Families Tell will shortly be published by Oxford University Press.