Sara Cohen is a Professor at the University of Liverpool where she holds the James and Constance Alsop Chair in Music and is Director of the Institute of Popular Music. She has a DPhil in Social Anthropology from Oxford University and is author of Rock Culture in Liverpool (1991) and Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture (2007), co-author of Harmonious Relations (1991) and Liverpool’s Musical Landscapes (2018), and co-editor of Sites of Popular Music Heritage (2014). She is an editorial board member for five international peer-reviewed journals.

Sara has specialised in ethnographic research on popular music, defined its broadest sense. Her research interests have centred on place, heritage and cultural memory, and she is currently developing research on ageing. Through projects with musicians aged fifty and above, and the residents of a Liverpool-based care home, this research considers how music is related to people’s ideas and experiences of ageing. It is informed by research that Sara has conducted with older adults since the early 1990s as part of efforts to challenge the preoccupation with youth culture in popular music studies, and explore intergenerational relations in popular music culture. Her research has involved collaboration with museums, galleries, architects, heritage managers, music businesses and other external organisations.

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