School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

My areas of specialization are cultural sociology, the sociology of the arts, and sociological theory. In my research on music, I have drawn on my background as a conservatory-trained cellist. My book, Performing Civility (Cambridge University Press 2015), was the first study to analyse the social aspects of international classical music competitions. Recently, I guest edited a special issue on the cultural sociology of art and music for the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. This was expanded into an edited collection that was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022. My research has been published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Cultural Sociology, The Chopin Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Contemporary Social Science, and Sociologia & Anthropologia. I am a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and I serve on the steering committee for the BSA Sociology of the Arts Study Group. From 2016-2020, I was co-editor of Cultural Sociology, an official journal of the British Sociological Association.

For a full CV, please go to my profile on academia.edu.

Topics interested in supervising

I would be most helpful to students interested in cultural sociology. I am particularly interested in topics related to music and the arts, but I also welcome the opportunity to supervise projects in the cultural sociology of disaster and topics that relate to my interests in the civil sphere, social performance, and sociological theory. Other areas in which I have expertise are microsociology (self, identity and interaction) and the sociology of death. I am most interested in working with postgraduate students pursuing theoretically-driven projects who want to use qualitative methods in their research.

If you are interested in being supervised by Lisa McCormick, please see the links below (opening in new windows) for more information:

• PhD in Sociology
• MSc (R) Sociology
• MSc (R) Socio-Cultural Studies