13 Last updated  24 January 2023

946 Google Scholar Citations

I joined the School in January 2019 as Senior Lecturer in Media and Popular Culture. I am Director of the Popular Music Studies Research Group and a member of the Centre for Participatory Culture and the Centre for the Study of Music, Culture and Identity.

I research gender, big data and popular music. I am currently researching sexual violence at live music events and have created a resource for venues to write safer spaces policies (saferspaces.org.uk). I am also investigating women’s musical responses to gender-based violence with colleagues at RMIT and Melbourne.

I have also researched sexual violence in chart topping rock and metal lyrics (funded by BA/Leverhulme). My postdoc, Seeing Data: are good big data visualisations possible? (Media, Leeds), explored how people engage with data visualisations and has produced a number of well-regarded articles including 'The Feeling of Numbers' in the journal Sociology. My PhD (Centre for Women’s Studies, York) looked at representations and experiences of women hard rock and metal music fans. This is the subject of my book Gender, Metal and the Media: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music (Palgrave), which I discussed with Laurie Taylor on Radio 4's 'Thinking Allowed'.

I am the book series editor of Advances in Metal Music and Culture and on the editorial advisory boards of Cultivate and Metal Music Studies.

Before joining my colleagues at Huddersfield I led the University of Leeds' Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies. Prior to that I held teaching posts at University of York (Women’s Studies, English and Related Literature, Sociology, Management, Computing Service), University of Northampton (Popular Music) and Leeds Trinity University (Media).