Emma Hornby's research focuses on medieval western liturgical chant. She currently works on Old Hispanic chant, in a series of international collaborations which have been funded by the European Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. 

Together with Kati Ihnat (Radboud University, Netherlands), Rebecca Maloy (Notre Dame, South Bend) and Raquel Rojo Carrillo (Complutense University, Madrid), she completed a ground-breaking book Understanding the Old Hispanic Office (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Recent work, with these and other collaborators, has explored the veneration of saints in medieval Iberia, musical handwriting and the development of Iberian musical notations, medieval processions, and the intersection of music and theology in the Middle Ages.

Emma also has research interests in the transmission of western liturgical chant (including aspects of orality), analysis of formulaic chant, and the relationship between words and music in the Middle Ages.

Emma is co-editor, with J.R.Watson, of the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology (online publication, 2013). This major resource is the first encyclopedic dictionary in this subject area since John Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology (1892); totalling approximately 2,000,000 words, it contains over 3000 entries by 300 contributors.

Her first book, Gregorian and Old Roman Eighth-Mode Tracts, was published by Ashgate in 2002 and her second book, Medieval Liturgical Chant and Patristic Exegesis: words and music in the second-mode tracts was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2009. Together with Rebecca Maloy, she published Music and Meaning in Old Hispanic Lenten Chants with Boydell and Brewer in 2013. She is co-editor, with David Maw, of Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell: Sources, Style, Performance, Historiography (Boydell and Brewer, 2010).

Emma has published articles in major scholarly journals including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, Music and Letters, Traditio, Scriptorium, Plainsong and Medieval Music and The Journal of Musicology; her Journal of Musicology article was included in Thomas Forrest Kelly’s collection of seminal articles in the field, Oral and Written Transmission in Chant (Ashgate, 2009). Emma is director of the Bristol University music department’s Schola Cantorum,which specialises in medieval music.

Emma won a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009, and has also been awarded grants by the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society Programme (2009-11), the European Research Council (2013-18), the AHRC (2016-17 and 2019-24), the Leverhulme Trust (2016-21) and the Leverhulme/British Academy (2020-22). These collaborative research projects have a separate web page: bristol.ac.uk/oho-project