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.
Her 2022 essay, “Searching for Wyatt Earp in Anatolia: The American West in the Turkish Imagination,” examines the ways the West as a global mythic site has been transformed into a local expression of Turkish identity. This work was published in a special issue of the Journal of Arizona History, for which she also served as guest editor.
More recent academic work explores the ways the tropes of the American West emerge in and intersect with science fiction. Her article, “Home. Family. Future: Authenticity, the Frontier Myth, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” was published in ContactZone: Journal of the Italian Association for the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy in the spring of 2022. Forthcoming from The Journal of American Studies is an explication of the use of the frontier myth in the region known as the Colonies in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In the works is a study of the intersection of race, memory, and UFO tourism in Roswell, New Mexico, and a mapping of E.M. Forster’s conception of “the imponderable bloom” onto Apple TV’s Silo.
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.