Dr Elizabeth Cook
Contact details
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About
Overview
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 also 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, and is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, UK.
Elizabeth welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students interested in working in the following areas: i) Domestic Homicide Reviews/Domestic Abuse-related Death Reviews; ii) femicide/feminicide; and iii) family and community responses (grief/mourning, activism, peer support) to violent death.
Visiting appointments
- International Visiting Scholar, Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, June - July 2023
- Research Associate, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, May 2023 - present
- Research Associate, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, January 2020 - December 2021
- , Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, September - October 2019
Research students
Sarah Dangar
Attendance: October 2023 - present, full-time
Thesis title: Revisiting the sociology of suicide: A comparative analysis of statutory fatality reviews in the context of domestic abuse-related suicide
Role: 2nd Supervisor
Katie Smith
Attendance: October 2021 - December 2025
Thesis title: Patterns of utilisation of domestic violence support services
Role: 1st Supervisor
Publications
Publications by category
Book
- Cook, E. (2020). Family Activism in the Aftermath of Fatal Violence. Victims, Culture and Society. ISBN 9780367422783.
Chapters (5)
- Miles, C., Cook, E.A. and Pullerits, M. (2025). Change, Intimacy, and Relationships: Implications for Measuring Intimate and Non-intimate Femicide. Femicide (pp. 29-42). Emerald Publishing Limited. ISBN 9781836080411.
- Cook, E. and Ellis, A. (2020). Violence in the City: Inequality, Intimidation and Fear. In Dobson, J. and Atkinson, R. (Eds.), Urban Crisis, Urban Hope: A Policy Agenda for UK Cities (pp. 49-54). London: Anthem Press. ISBN 9781785274718.
- Cook, E.A. (2020). Bereaved Family Activism. Victimology (pp. 115-134). Springer International Publishing. ISBN 9783030422875.
- In Cook, E.A. and Walklate, S. (Eds.), (2019). Excavating Victim Stories: Making Sense of Agency, Suffering and Redemption. In The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology (pp. 239-257). Emerald Publishing Limited. ISBN 9781787690066.
- Cook, E. (2019). Witnessing, responsibility and spectatorship in the aftermath of violence. Emotions and Crime (pp. 154-168). Routledge.
Internet publications (3)
- Feder, G., Cook, E.A. and McManus, S.Safeguards against domestic abuse and coercion in the assisted dying bill must be strengthened. BMJ.
- Cook, E., Rowlands, J. and Dangar, S.(2024).Consultation response to the revised Statutory Guidance for the Conduct of Domestic Homicide Reviews.
- Cook, E., Ellis, A., Billingham, L. and Irwin-Rodgers, K.(2020).Violence in our Cities. BSC Blog.
Journal articles (19)
- Cook, D., Cook, E., Cullen, K., Zachos, K., McManus, S., Bellis, M.A.... Maiden, N. (2026). Artificial intelligence in critical synthesis of public health responses to violence: A novel application to UK violence prevention policy. Public Health, 255, pp. 106258-106258. doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2026.106258
- Cook, D., Cook, E.A., Roy, S., Thiara, R. and Selvarajah, R. (2026). A collaborative approach to applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Domestic Homicide Reviews (DHRs): A study protocol. PLOS One, 21(5), pp. e0348948-e0348948. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0348948
- Innes, A.J., Slootmaeckers, K., Cook, E., Adisa, O., Blumell, L., Feder, G.... Sjoberg, L. (2026). Collective Discussion: Violence as a boundary object: Implications for the field of International Political Sociology. International Political Sociology
- Cook, E.A., Jankowitz, S. and Atkinson, R. (2026). Violence reduction in a changing European urban context: Frontline practitioner’s understanding of the roots of violence, and why it matters for policy and prevention. European Urban and Regional Studies, 33(2), pp. 240-254. doi:10.1177/09697764251386774
- Miles, C. and Cook, E.A. (2026). Non-intimate femicide in England and Wales: A ‘continua’ approach. The British Journal of Criminology. doi:10.1093/bjc/azag005
- Cook, E.A., Miles, C. and Pullerits, M. (2026). Definitions of non-intimate partner and family-related femicide/feminicide: A scoping review. Social Science & Medicine, 393, pp. 118917-118917. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118917
- Cook, E.A. (2025). Conflating the map with the territory: Challenges for evidence syntheses on homicide in a global context. International Sociology, 40(6), pp. 944-963. doi:10.1177/02685809251336694
- Cook, E.A. and McManus, S. (2024). Indirect victims of violence: Mental health and the close relatives of serious assault victims in England. Social Science & Medicine, 359, pp. 117278-117278. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117278
- Carlisle, S., Bunce, A., Prina, M., Cook, E., Barbosa, E.C., McManus, S.... Lewis, N.V. (2024). Trends in outcomes used to measure the effectiveness of UK-based support interventions and services targeted at adults with experience of domestic and sexual violence and abuse: a scoping review. BMJ Open, 14(4), pp. e074452-e074452. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2023-074452
- Innes, A., Carlisle, S., Manzur, H., Cook, E., Corsi, J. and Lewis, N.V. (2024). Prevalence of physical violence against people in insecure migration status: A systematic review and meta-analysis. PLOS ONE, 19(3), pp. e0300189-e0300189. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0300189
- Tomczak, P. and Cook, E.A. (2023). Bereaved Family ‘Involvement’ in (Prisoner) Death Investigations: Whose ‘Satisfaction’? Social & Legal Studies, 32(2), pp. 294-317. doi:10.1177/09646639221100480
- Cook, E.A., Rowlands, J., Bracewell, K., Jones, C. and Boughton, G. (2023). Parallels in Practice: Applying Principles of Research Integrity and Ethics in Domestic Violence Fatality Review (DVFR). Journal of Family Violence. doi:10.1007/s10896-023-00505-x
- A. Cook, E., Walklate, S. and Fitz-Gibbon, K. (2023). Re-imagining what counts as femicide. Current Sociology, 71(1), pp. 3-9. doi:10.1177/00113921221106502
- McManus, S., Walby, S., Barbosa, E.C., Appleby, L., Brugha, T., Bebbington, P.E.... Knipe, D. (2022). Intimate partner violence, suicidality, and self-harm: a probability sample survey of the general population in England. The Lancet Psychiatry, 9(7), pp. 574-583. doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(22)00151-1
- Rowlands, J. and Cook, E.A. (2022). Navigating Family Involvement in Domestic Violence Fatality Review: Conceptualising Prospects for Systems and Relational Repair. Journal of Family Violence, 37(4), pp. 559-572. doi:10.1007/s10896-021-00309-x
- Cook, E.A. and Walklate, S. (2022). Gendered objects and gendered spaces: The invisibilities of ‘knife’ crime. Current Sociology, 70(1), pp. 61-76. doi:10.1177/0011392120932972
- Cook, E., Markham, S., Parker, J., John, A., Barnicot, K. and McManus, S. (2022). Risk, responsibility, and choice in research ethics. The Lancet Psychiatry, 9(1), pp. 5-6. doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(21)00434-x
- Cook, E.A. (2021). Motherhood, moral authority and the charismatic matriarch in the aftermath of lethal violence. Criminology & Criminal Justice, 21(3), pp. 353-368. doi:10.1177/1748895820914359
- McGowan, W. and Cook, E.A. (2020). Comprehensive or Comprehensible Experience? A Case Study of Religion and Traumatic Bereavement. Sociological Research Online. doi:10.1177/1360780420978662
Working paper
- Rowlands, J. and Cook, E. (2025). Learning Across Statutory Reviews: Conference Proceedings.
Other (5)
- Cook, E., Rowlands, J., Davies, B., Dickens, J., Mullane, F., Preston-Shoot, M.... Roy, S.(2024). Learning across statutory review practices: Origins, ambitions, and future directions.
- Corsi, J., Cook, E., McManus, S., Innes, A.J. and Capelas Barbosa, E.(2021). The gendered dimensions of defences to homicide: a systematic review protocol.
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Innes, A.J., Capelas Barbosa, E., Cook, E., Corsi, J., Kotanen, R. and McManus, S.(2021). Prevalence of violence experienced by people with insecure immigration status, and perceptions of association with immigration control (protocol).
[PROSPERO]
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Kotanen, R., McManus, S., Cook, E., Innes, A.J., Corsi, J. and Capelas Barbosa, E.(2021). Changes in statutory child protection service interventions in response to parental physical violence against children, 1990 to 2021: a systematic review (protocol).
[PROSPERO]
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Walby, S., Stockl, H., Cook, E., Innes, A.J., McManus, S., Corsi, J.... Capelas Barbosa, E.(2021). Sex/gender-disaggregated fatal violence: a systematic review (protocol).
[PROSPERO]
Professional activities
Editorial activity (3)
- Co-Editor of 'Violence, Inequality and Change' (Routledge Series, Criminology and Criminal Justice), With Dr. Caroline Miles (University of Manchester), November 2022 - present.
- Member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC), Providing peer review of grant applications submitted to the AHRC, March 2022 - December 2025.
- Member of the Editorial Board for Sociology, Member of the Editorial Board for Sociology, the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association.