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 developing a theory of change of violence, health and society.

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 Small Grant to investigate non-intimate femicide.

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 fatality in Lancet Psychiatry, Social and Legal Studies, Criminology & Criminal Justice, 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.