Professor Cormac Newark studied Music at the University of Oxford, Music Theory and Analysis at King's College London, and orchestral conducting at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. Returning to Oxford, he wrote his doctoral dissertation (on the reception of Parisian grand opéra) under the supervision of Roger Parker; then for three years he was a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Between 2002 and 2004 he lived in Bologna, carrying out research funded by the Leverhulme Trust, after which he took up a lectureship at the University of Ulster.
He has been the recipient of a number of grants and prizes from, among others, the British Academy, the Worshipful Company of Musicians, the French Government, and the American Musicological Society. Cormac works mainly on nineteenth-century French and Italian opera and literature. His book, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust, was published by CUP in 2011, and his essays have appeared in 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and various edited collections. He has also written for Opera magazine and the Guardian.
Newark, Cormac. "The representation of violence in Irish opera: Ian Wilson’s Hamelin." In Performing violence in contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick, 131-142 Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2009.
Newark, Cormac. "“In Italy we don’t have the means for illusion”: Grand opéra in nineteenth-century Bologna." Cambridge Opera Journal 19, 3 (2007), 199-222.
Newark, Cormac. "Interpreting La Muette." In Eugène Scribe und das europäische Musiktheater, edited by Sebastian Werr, 46-64 Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007.