Chengyao's research interests includes Holocaust theatre, contemporary history play, playwriting and dramaturgy, metatheatre, and memory studies.

Chengyao's thesis, provisionally titled ‘Staging Real-Life Perpetrators: The Dramaturgies and Ethics of Holocaust Theatre’, explores various dramaturgical approaches and their entailed ethical issues of portraying Nazi perpetrators on the contemporary British stage. By analysing three cases of Holocaust drama by Julia Pascal, David Edgar, and Ronald Harwood at the turn of the twenty-first century, the thesis seeks to theorise the underlying moral tension embedded in Holocaust theatre as both a cultural practice and a scholarly discipline.