Lisa McCormick is a Lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely in the sociology of the arts and serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology and Music and Art in Action. She is co-editor, with Ron Eyerman, of Myth, Meaning and Performance (2006). Her first article on music competitions, which appeared in Cultural Sociology in 2009, won the SAGE prize in excellence and/or innovation. She is also a Faculty Fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, Connecticut and a Research Associate with the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath.