Music and film has been the main field of my research for more than a decade, with work on film music and narrative theory (monograph Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Steps across the Border, 2013), on composer biopics and on musical films in Nazi cinema (and after), but also on other topics: film music by Hanns Eisler, Ennio Morricone or Michael Nyman; music in Mildred Peirce, The Truman Show, The Blair Witch Project, Dancer in the Dark or German 60s TV series Raumpatrouille; music in romantic comedies, GDR films or films about Stonehenge. I am currently writing a monograph on music and comedy in film and narrative television, a topic that, puzzlingly, had been ignored by film music scholarship for a long time.

A second field of research has been English twentieth-century art music. I wrote my PhD dissertation on English tone poems in the early 20th century and questions of a national music at the University of Münster/Germany (published in 2007 as Das Nationale als Problem in der englischen Musik des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Tondichtungen von Granville Bantock, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, George Butterworth, Gerald Finzi und Gustav Holst), but have also written about Benjamin Britten, Frederick Delius and other aspects of British art-music history. I am currently co-director of CHOMBEC, the Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth here at the Department of Music. A long-term ambition of mine is to write a book on pastoral music, but it may be a while until that idea reaches a more concrete form.

2001-2010 I was co-editor of the cultural-studies journal Plurale. Zeitschrift für Denkversionen. Since 2006 I have been a member of the editorial team of the online journal Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, the only academic journal for screen media musicology in German. I am also a member of the editorial board of the journal The Soundtrack. With Phil Powrie (University of Surrey), I co-edited a special issue for the journal Music, Sound and the Moving Image (vol. 8:2, 2014) on music in film and TV trailers, title sequences and end credits, and together with Peter Moormann (University of Cologne/Germany), Tarek Krohn and Willem Strank (both University of Kiel/Germany), I am co-editor of the book series FilmMusik (Munich: edition text + kritik); volumes 1, 2 and 3 on Ennio Morricone, on music in the films of Martin Scorsese and on music in film comedies have been published (2014, 2015 & 2017), the fourth volume on music in film title sequences is in preparation (for publication in 2018), and a fifth volume on sound design in film is in planning.