Professor Tia DeNora

In company over many years with the SocArts Research Group at Exeter, my research examines how culture is made informs felt social life in real places and in real time.

Within that focus, I work as a music sociologist, mostly focused on health and wellbeing. I work in the area of sociological theory but am very committed to empirical research and to the values of 'gentle empiricism' and 'slow' sociology.

My research is ethnographic. I have explored music in daily life, musical care in late life and end of life, and music in relaiton to mental health. I collaborate with music therapists and musicians around topics like improvisaiton, identity, pain management, mutual care. With Gary Ansdell I have a book coming out in Novemeber 2026 entitled Caring for Music, the outcome of the AHRC Care for Music Project of 2019-2023. I'm currently writing a book on the Leverhulme Major Fellowship project on cultural change around death, dying and bereavement.

My work has been funded by  AHRC, Leverhulme, and ESRC and I collaborate with others on Norwegian Research Council and Australian Research Council projects.   For more information see the Care for Music Website

and the Island Life and Death website. 

The SocArts journal, Music and Arts in Action (MAiA), founded by PhD students and postdocs from SocArts is now in its 18h year. The most recent issue can be found here: http://musicandartsinaction.net.

The spirit of SocArts lives on. The Pebbles in the Pond.

My undergraduate studies were in music (my major instrument was flute) and sociology at West Chester University in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I completed my PhD in Sociology in 1989 at the University of California San Diego. From then until 1992, I worked at University of Wales Cardiff (where I was a University of Wales Fellow from 1989-91). I moved to Exeter in 1992. I have been a Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology since 2004 and recently was elected Fellow of the British Academy. I've served as Chair of the ESA Network on Arts Sociology and on various councils of learned societies, editorial boards and the 2008/2014 national Research Excellence Framework sub-panel for Sociology. With Gary Ansdell, I currently co-edit of the Routledge Series on Music & Change: Ecological Perspectives. I have received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh and the University of Bergen, Norway.