Elizabeth Cook

Dr. Elizabeth Cook is a Senior Lecturer in the Violence and Society Centre, City, University of London, which she joined in January 2020.

As a sociologist and criminologist, her principal areas of research expertise include homicide, family, and gender and their intersections with harms to society, specifically: analysing pathways between gender, inequality, and homicide; improving statutory fatality review systems; and accounting for the impact of family advocacy and activism on crime, justice and punishment. Her expertise forms part of a large UKRI-funded Prevention Research Partnership (PRP) Consortium Award on Violence, Health and Society, of which, she is a Co-Investigator. This Consortium engages with multiple public, governmental and third sector bodies who generate data on violence with the aim of reducing violence as a cause of health inequalities. As part of this grant, she is involved in delivering systematic and scoping reviews, participatory action research with Lambeth Peer Action Collective (LPAC) to reduce violence against young people, and exploring collaborative approaches to applying artificial intelligence to improve Domestic Homicide Reviews/Domestic Abuse-related Death Reviews (DHRs/DARDRs).

She is a Member of the Peer Review College (PRC) of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Editorial Board of Sociology. She is also a Co-Investigator on a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant to improve commissioning of DHRs/DARDRs in England and Wales.

Recent notable publications in this area include her monograph, Family Activism in the Aftermath of Fatal Violence (2021, Routledge), a special issue co-edited with Professors Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sandra Walklate in Current Sociology (2022), Re-imagining what counts as femicide, with further articles published on homicide/femicide in Lancet Psychiatry, Social and Legal Studies, Criminology & Criminal Justice, and International Sociology among others.

Previously, she was awarded a PhD in Criminology from the Centre of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Manchester funded by an ESRC +3 Studentship and Presidential Doctoral Scholarship Award. She has since worked at the University of Oxford as an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow and University of Sheffield as a Max Batley Postdoctoral Research Associate. She was a 2019 International Visiting Scholar at the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, Monash University, Australia.