© 2025 KGOU
News and Music for Oklahoma
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

BBC's The Forum: What makes us nostalgic?

Vintage photographs with a dried rose.
Alicia Llop
/
Getty Images
Vintage photographs with a dried rose.

Airdate: Sunday, June 8, 2025 at 12 p.m.

Nostalgia is one of those complicated emotions: we long to be transported to a place or moment in the past that we have loved but at the same time feel sad that it has gone forever. It is also a bit of a slippery intellectual concept: regarded as a malady when the term was first coined in the 17th century, nostalgia is now thought to be benign or even mildly therapeutic. And beyond personal recollections, business uses it to sell all manner of things and some politicians skilfully deploy it to hide their real objectives. So what actually is nostalgia?

Join us as The Forum's Iszi Lawrence explores the past and present of nostalgia with Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster , author of Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Prof. Krystine Batcho who devised the Nostalgia Inventory and Dr. Tobias Becker author of Yesterday, A New History of Nostalgia.

Heard on KGOU
Support public radio: accessible, informative, enlightening. Give now.