Lee, Murray

Murray Lee is a Professor in Criminology at the University of Sydney Law School. Murray’s research interests focus broadly on representations of crime, affect and the sensory, and processes of criminalisation. His work on public perceptions and fear of crime has been internationally influential at a policy and scholarly level, while his critical studies of sexting, the mediatization of crime and crime control, and the development of new forms surveillance such as police body worn cameras, have explored the criminalising capacities of emergent technologies. Murray's current research projects involve the criminology of popular music or musicriminology, the criminalisation of environmental protest, and perceptions of crime and affective spaces and atmospheres. He leads the three-year ARC Discovery project Policing Australian Popular Music, an interdisciplinary project tracing the historical and contemporary relationships between musicians, their audiences, and policing and other forms of state regulation (2024-2026).
Murray has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, The ISSA Onati Spain, John Jay College, and the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminology and the Politics of Anxiety, co-author of Policing and Media: Public Relations, Simulations and Communications, co-author of Sexting and Young People, co-editor of Fear of Crime: Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety, co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime, and served as editor of the scholarly journal Current Issues in Criminal Justice for ten years. He is a member of the Sydney Institute of Criminology.
Area(s) of expertise: Fear of Crime / Representations of Crime / Sensory criminology / criminalisation of protest / justice and sound