Dr. McCormack’s interdisciplinary approach is reflected in her examinations of the mythic West, conceptions of the past, popular culture, and science and dystopian fiction. Her first book, Imagining Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die, goes beyond the famous gunfight near the O.K. Corral to look at the tourism industry in Tombstone and the ways the town must negotiate between selling its own history and meeting the expectations of tourists that have been cultivated through popular culture. Taking into account decades of preservation efforts; performance on the town’s streets; the stories told about Tombstone and Wyatt Earp by fiction writers, filmmakers, and television producers; the ways the West has circulated around the world, and the fervor with which Earp historians and western history buffs keep the field alive, this work demonstrates that Tombstone’s future rests not solely on its past but on a wide variety of avenues of sustainability that have earned it the reputation as “The Town too Tough to Die.”
Also informing this project are the thematic similarities between portrayals of the West and science fiction, particularly their shared focus on processes of change, the regenerative power of the frontier, the relationship between the individual and society, and promises of adventure and opportunity. She included in this work an analysis of representations of the Sci Fi West, most notably the Star Trek episode “Spectre of the Gun” and Michael Crichton’s Westworld.
A chapter from Imagining Tombstone, “Historians’ Gunfight,” which traces the ways historians and journalists have portrayed controversial lawman Wyatt Earp throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, has been reprinted in the recently released A Wyatt Earp Anthology: Long May His Story Be Told, published by the University of North Texas Press and edited by Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts, and Casey Tefertiller.
She is currently working on a number of other projects, including an examination of the American West in the Turkish imagination. This project includes interviews with westerns-loving Turks, textual analysis of Turkish westerns, and a visit to the only western-themed town in Turkey. Another project examines the link between memory, race, and UFO tourism in Roswell, New Mexico. This project has entailed archival research and ethnography in Roswell, research so far made possible through a scholar-in-residence grant from the University of New Mexico.
She has also been engaging in other projects, including a community/public history project, BY THE PEOPLE: THE PEOPLE’S MUSEUM OF BROCKTON; an analysis of the ways films have represented the West as a space of disaster and apocalypse; and an examination of the production and consumption of the mythic West around the world.