School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

In the 2025-2026 academic year, I am on sabbatical to work on my research project "Musical Instruments as Iconic Objects" as a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, CEU in Budapest. 

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. I am currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook on Competition in Music with Prof Tobias Werron (Univestät Bielefeld) and Dr Christoph Müller-Oberhäuser (UdK Berlin). 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 Chair of the History of Sociology and Social Thought section of the American Sociology Association and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. I also 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.

PhD Students

Peter Lawson (fully funded, Edinburgh Doctoral College Scholarship recipient): Brass Instruments of the Middle East and Europe: Comparative Historical Archaeology of Labrosones from the Medieval to Present (started 2024, with Jenny Nex and Beatrijs de Groot) 

Jiayi Tian (fully funded, School of Social and Political Science 2-year PhD Scholarship): Made in Dafen: The Culture of Creating and the Creating of Culture in Post-Socialist China (started 2023, with Liliana Riga)

Helen Hines (fully funded by the Edinburgh College of Art): The Future of Instrumental Teaching: How Digital Technology is Shaping British Music Education (part-time, started 2022, with Nikki Moran)

Ingebjørg Sophie Larsen (fully funded): From “intermediary” to “mediation”: Exploring the role and characteristics of music criticism in Norwegian legacy media. NMH, Norwegian Academy of Music (started 2021, with Sigrid Røyseng)

Matea Senkic (self-funded): The construction of Authentic Edinburgh: a cultural perspective (started 2019, viva held 31 March 2025, with Stephen Kemp)

Katey Warran: (fully funded by the AHRC) Interaction Ritual Chains at the Fringe (started 2017, viva held 19 August 2021, with David Stevenson)

Dominik Želinský: (fully funded by the ESRC) The only true philosophers? Charismatic performances of unofficial philosophy in socialist Czechoslovakia (started 2016, viva held 18 December 2019, with Ross Bond)

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