Some research topics of current interest to the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre include:
- voice and vocality in opera and music theatre: the implications for new opera of the metaphysics of subjectivity, interiority and transcendence in conventional operatic singing; economies of virtuosity - discourses of the mechanical and expressive in the technique of singing; embodied and disembodied voices in the recording era; the erotics of the voice; the gendered voice, etc.
- post-operatic music theatre: from Cage, Kagel and Fluxus to Heiner Goebbels and Laurie Anderson.
- the implications of new technologies for expanded dramaturgies of time and space in multi-media art forms.
- the chorus in contemporary opera: problematic representations of "we" in postmodern culture and society.
- dramaturgies of listening: radio opera and Hoerstuck.
- translating opera for the small screen and other media.
- new models for performance analysis of opera and music theatre as multi-media art forms.
- developing new devising and improvisatory processes for music theatre that challenge the conventional hierarchies of composition, text setting and musical and dramatic interpretation.
- the use of theatrical performance for dramatic re-contextualisation of non-theatrical music.
- figurations of the "operatic" in contemporary culture.