BA (Warwick), MA (Warwick), PhD (Warwick)
Office: 3G5, 12 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UQ, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7504
Email: l.marshall@bristol.ac.uk
Note: some of the documents on this page are in PDF format. In order to view a PDF you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader
I am Senior Lecturer in Sociology. I moved to Bristol in 2003, having previously worked at the University of East Anglia and University College Worcester.
My research cover a range of areas within the sociology of culture that centre around the ideas about ‘authorship’ that exist in modern life. In particular, I am interested in how ideological constructions about individuality and personality inflect daily cultural practices. The chief theoretical idea underpinning my work is to see Romanticism as a constitutive element of (post) modernity rather than as merely a historical moment of cultural production, and I am especially interested in the importance of Romanticism to the capitalist production of culture. To this end, I have completed work on ideas of authorship within copyright, emphasising the significance of a Romantic concept of originality to intellectual property legislation and I have recently become interested in stardom and celebrity, perhaps the clearest contemporary example of the intersection of Romanticism and capitalism.
Although my work includes many different types of cultural production, my main substantive interest lies in popular music, and I am an active member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. I am interested in the construction of aesthetic value within musical discourse and particularly how the structuring of the music industry shapes such discourse.
I am currently working on two related areas. Firstly, I am looking into how the voice creates meaning in popular music outside of the semantic meaning of the words being sung. I am particularly interested in the 'performerliness' of singing (singing as a conscious/deliberate process) and how that corresponds to how listeners respond to voices. Secondly, I am developing ideas for how a sociological approach may be able to provide insight into understanding the experience of listening to music. In particular, I am considering how latent knowledge is used in the construction of musical meaning.
I am currently supervising three doctoral students on a) nostalgic representations of the 1960s; b) Christian and Muslim punk subcultures; and c) online fandom and the construction of identity. I would welcome enquiries from potential doctoral students on any aspect of the sociology of culture, but particularly on sociological approaches to Romanticism and the empirical areas of popular music, copyright or stardom.
I am unit convenor for the first year undergraduate unit, Thinking Sociologically. I also teach the undergraduate unit The Sociology of Popular Music.