Dr Lee Marshall

Personal profile

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.

Research

I am a sociologist of culture and my main research interests centre on issues concerning authorship, stardom and the music industry. Theoretically, I am interested in how ideological constructions about individuality and personality inflect cultural practices. Although my work includes different types of cultural production, my main substantive interest is popular music, and I am an active member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. The main focus of my work is on the music industry, but not merely in terms of economics and institutions. Rather, I am interested in how the structuring of the music industry shapes the discourses and practices involved in popular music consumption. In my opinion, if we want to understand what people in popular music (musicians, fans, critics...) say and do, then we must contextualise their actions within a broader institutional framework.

In my early career, I specialised on copyright and piracy in the music industry. I co-edited Music and Copyright with Professor Simon Frith in 2004 and my first sole-authored book Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry (2005) won the Socio-Legal Studies Association’s early career book prize. Since then, I have become interested in sociologically understanding celebrity and stardom and my most recent book, Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (2007) is an attempt to understand an individual star through a sociological lens.

I am currently working on a number of projects that maintain my interests in stars and also contemporary developments in the music industry. Firstly, I am editing a book entitled The International Recording Industries, to be published by Routledge in 2012. This book seeks to challenge the anglocentrism of popular music studies by providing case studies of the recording industry in eight different countries. Secondly, I am investigating contemporary changes in the music industry and what these mean for those working in the industry, and for popular music more broadly. I have just completed an article on new contractual models in the recording industry (“360 deals”) and their implications. My intention is to develop these ideas into two books, one on the music industry in the twenty-first century, and one on popular music stars.

Teaching

I am the unit convenor for the first year undergraduate unit, Thinking Sociologically. I also teach the undergraduate units Art and Society and The Sociology of Popular Music, and the masters unit Popular Music and Society.

I have supervised one PhD student to completion, on online fandom and the construction of identity, and am currently supervising two further PhD students, one on Christian punks and one on Chinese young people's internet use. I would welcome applications from research students seeking to sociologically study any aspect of popular culture/media but particularly topics related to popular music, stardom or intellectual property.

Full publications list in the University of Bristol publications system