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Professor Sunderland’s research concentrates on medieval French, Occitan and Franco-Italian culture. His current project focuses on the visual and verbal constructions of knowledge in vernacular encyclopedias. In his research, Sunderland thinks in terms of the 'complex singularities' (the cosmos, nature, knowledge, the body, the community) which structure ideas and create connections between diverse beings: angels, humans, animals, plants and stones. He asks how these ontological and epistemological systems are reconfigured as encyclopedias were reshaped in different manuscript versions.

Sunderland’s most recent book, Rebel Barons: Resisting Royal Power in Medieval Culture focuses on the chansons de geste, or songs of deeds. In it, he explores the rebel barons in France, England and Italy, their prose rewritings, and the resistance against royal power in medieval culture. The book explores epic poems popular in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, set in the time of Charlemagne. He examines the subject through the lens of medieval political theory and thought about vengeance, anthropological work on feud and rebellion, and histories of sovereignty.  He has been featured on the Song of Roland on BBC Radio 4's “In Our Time”, where he and other scholars discussed the Song of Roland and its significance.

Sunderland’s other book, Old French Narrative Cycles: Heroism Between Ethics and Morality explores cyclical narratives, with a focus on the relationship between ethics and the figure of the hero in the Guillaume d'Orange cycle, the Lancelot and Tristan prose romances, and the Roman de Renart. His research interests include the materiality of medieval historiography and romance, medieval practices and concepts of translation, cosmopolitanism, textual geographies and hybrid languages, including the French of Italy.

Before coming to Durham, Sunderland was a graduate student at King's College London, and a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Prior to that, he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and a visiting scholar in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.