After completing her PhD at King's College, Cambridge, she held a research fellowship at
St John's College, Cambridge. Upon completing her fellowship, Forrester accepted a permanent lectureship at
Queen Mary University of London until 2017 when she joined the faculty at
Harvard University. Forrester held a Kluge Fellowship at the
Library of Congress from 2019 to 2020 and delivered the Quentin Skinner Lecture at Cambridge in 2023. Forrester's book
In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy received the
Organization of American Historians'
Merle Curti Award for Best Book in Intellectual History by the Organization of American Historians the Society for US Intellectual History's Book Award, the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought's
David and Elaine Spitz Prize, the Montreal Political Theory Manuscript Workshop Award, and was shortlisted for the
Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize 2020. Forrester has written on topics like pornography, sex work, surveillance, work, and capitalism for the
London Review of Books,
The New Yorker,
Dissent,
n+1,
Jacobin, ''Harper's
and The Guardian
, amongst others. She is the co-editor of Nature, Action and the Future: Political Thought and the Environment
with Sophie Smith, and of a special section of Dissent'' with Moira Weigel. Currently she is Consulting Editor of the
Journal of the History of Ideas. ==Personal life==